Page 26 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

more than 400 languages. That number represented more than ten percent of Google’s August 5, 2010 estimate of the number of different books in the world, excluding serials and pamphlets: 129,864,880. Regardless of the accuracy or inaccuracy of Google’s overall estimate, the magnitude of their accomplishment of scanning and making searchable over 15 million books10 within only five years may be put in perspective by considering the slow growth of printed book production in prior centuries. For comparison we have the statistics of the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue which provides an inventory of all surviving printing from its invention in 1455 to 1500. This includes a total of 29,777 different editions published in the first forty years after the introduction of printing, out of an original number of editions that is thought to be around 35,000.11 Following that we have the English Short Title Catalogue which lists all surviving books printed in English between 1473, the date of the first printing in English, to 1800. This lists over differ- ent 460,000 items published in over 300 years. Because this lists only books printed in English, we may reasonably assume that the number of printed titles in all languages would have exceeded the million mark fairly early in the eighteenth century, or around 150 years after the invention of printing. I have not seen a compilation of statistics on this matter.
As population grew and literacy increased over the next two hundred years, book production also increased, balanced by the inevitable losses from a wide variety of causes, the greatest being war. To cite the most dra- matic example, in the twelve years between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germa- ny systematically destroyed an estimated 100 million books produced over centuries throughout occupied Europe, an act inextricably bound up with the murder by the SS-Einsatzgruppen of six million Jews, and more than thirteen million unarmed Russians, Poles, and Russian POWs. Unlike all the unique individuals brutally murdered, only a certain percentage of those hundred million books would have represented unique items that are lost
10 In 2017 Jennifer Howard stated on edsurge.com that Google had scanned “at least 25 million books.”
11 In January 2011 the ISTC estimated that approximately 1500 of their entries were items that were no longer thought to have been printed in the fifteenth century.
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