So Many Books

Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance by Gabriel Zaid
A small book with a total of 142 pages.

This is a book review done in September of last year. It was originally posted here.

To the Unrepentant Reader,

The reading of books is growing arithmetically; the writing of books is growing exponentially.

If our passion for writing goes unchecked, in the near future there will be more people writing books than reading them!

This book is asking a question that nobody in their right mind would think to ask;

Is reading books really useful, healthy or even necessary?
If you say YES! Then you are absolutely wrong!

I am quoting selective passages from the book, so you can see what the author thinks

Page 22:

Books are published at such a rapid rate that they make us exponentially more ignorant. If a person read a book a day, he would be neglecting to read four thousand others, published the same day. In other words, the books he didn’t read would pile up four thousand times faster than the books he did read, and his ignorance would grow four thousand times faster than his knowledge.

Page 24:

A Universal Library system is established (a great library of Babel) that holds every single book ever published, more than fifty million titles;…each reader is able to read four books a week, two hundred a year, ten thousand in a half-century. It would be as nothing. If not a single book were published from this moment on, it would still take 250,000 years for us to acquaint ourselves with those books already written.

When we say that books should be read by everyone, we aren’t thinking. Our simple physical limitations make it impossible for us to read 99.9 percent of the books that are written.

Humankind writes more than it can read.