Page 2: The Self-Publishing Revolution

Each year more books are being published worldwide than the previous year. In the UK alone, it was recently estimated that in just one year 184,000 new titles were published. And even more books were produced the same year in China and the US. It is debatable though whether this is good news.

Jonny Geller, a literary agent at the New York entertainment agency, Curtis Brown, Ltd., said that growth like this is “either a sign of cultural vitality or publishing suicide.” “Of course,” he continues, “it is utter madness to publish so many books when the average person reads between one and five books a year, but would you prefer 184,000 new brands of shoes or pointless luxury items?” “In fact,” concludes Geller, “don’t answer that.”

But, for others, more books published annually is a positive thing. “For the vibrancy of culture,” comments Roland Philipps, managing director of the British publisher John Murray, “books are essential, and if publishers are taking on more they must believe that voices are deserving to be heard, even if not all those voices make an impact with the consumer.”

Still—hundreds of thousands of new brands of shoes aside—it is difficult to form a concrete image of the current rate of book production growth. The physicist Steven Hawking tried though to do this by speculating how fast one would have to travel to keep up with annual book production.

“If you stacked the new books being published next to each other,” wrote the physicist in Brief Answers to the Big Questions (2018), “at the present rate of production you would have to move at ninety miles an hour just to keep up with the end of the line.”

But unlike Philipps, for Hawking this rapid rate of growth is not a good thing.

“If the exponential growth continued,” said Hawking, “there would be ten papers a second in my kind of theoretical physics, and no time to read them.”

Moreover, this type of complaint about publishing growth is not just limited to new work in physics. The most recent numbers on just fiction produced annually in the US set it at around 50,000 new titles per year. Given that there are 525,600 minutes in a year, if you did nothing else all year but read these new titles, you would only have on average about 10 ½ minutes to peruse each one.

Hawking of course was projecting into the future with his calculation—and not focusing on present output. Given that there are 31,557,600 seconds in a year, and Hawking says that based on the current rate of growth he would need to read 10 papers a second, his projection for just new articles in theoretical physics is 315.5 billion per year.

If this were not dystopian enough, Hawking also adds that in the year 2600 (or about 250 years after the time period of Star Trek) all “new artistic and scientific work will come in electronic forms rather than physical books and papers.” Thus, according to one of the greatest minds of our time, in about six hundred years new books and articles will not only come out exclusively in electronic form, but these new works will be so voluminous that it will be impossible for humans to keep up with new research and creative work in their area of interest.

Even if we generally sympathize with those who complain that the amount of new fiction currently produced in the US makes it impossible to keep up with it as a scholar or writer of contemporary American fiction, in about six hundred years the present output of new fiction will seem manageable in terms of overall comprehension in comparison to the billions of works of new fiction produced annually in a not so distant future.

But there is another way to look at the exponential growth in publishing that embraces its voluminous future. Its source is not a physicist or contemporary scholar of American literature. Or even a publisher or literary agent, but an organization dedicated to supporting the establishment...