About 10 to 15 percent of these books are in print. The remaining books — the vast majority of all titles — are still under copyright but out of print. Google is in the process of borrowing copies of these books in order to digitize them, from about 40 large libraries worldwide. The company is now waiting for a judgement from the U. In , the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers separately filed class-action lawsuits against the search giant, asserting that the company is infringing on author copyrights by scanning in the books.
That takes the initial figure of Among novelists who have had large numbers of unique books printed, James seemed to me like he ought to rank quite highly considering his prolific output.
Predictably, Shakespeare appears at the top of the list. But quite a few of these placements surprised me: Twain has been printed far more than other 19 th century novelists like Austen, Eliot, and Melville, who also wrote a fairly large number of books. Faulkner and Hemingway appear surprisingly far down the list, being published more like J. Rowling than Fitzgerald, Woolf, and Cather. If we had the data, we could get novel counts for a list of highly printed novelists against their total number of novels and subtract overprinting from the total.
But running up against this blockade or, rather, the inflection point between diminishing returns and increasingly dubious assumptions allowed me to pause and reflect on what we have learned at this point. I also reflected on whether and how this figure relates to my initial question, considering the data that is actually available. Imprecise, presentist, and biased toward the published and the archived as it may be, what does having an order of magnitude tell us about the genre of the novel?
To answer that question, it helps to think about that number from the perspective of the reader who opened this essay. Literary critics, by contrast with this imagined reader, might know novels quite well, giving them purchase on somewhere between 0. What can I say? I love reading. I can only read 3 to 4 a week due to time restraints. I did go through a period of time when I was younger reading 3 to 4 a day seven days a week, mostly Harliquin Romances. It drove my parents mad trying to get me out doing other things.
I read on average between books a week, sometimes more, rarely less. Most all fiction except for my faith selections. I go through different periods where I read all mystery or All historical romance, etc. For past few years it has been medieval, Regency and Scottish Historical Romance novels. I read every night into the wee hours and have been doing so since between 2nd and 3rd grade.
I am now 56 years old so I guess I have read a lot! I used to be a regular patron of the library where I would borrow my books. I read approximately 1 book a day. I have been doing this pretty much every day, except Sundays, since I have been disabled which is approx. I am 57 now and if I live to be 79 and continue to do this I should read approx. I read approximately one book per day, although there are some that may run into two days, so I can safely say that I read about three hundred and fifty books per year.
My preferred genre is historical romance, but I can get captivated in a good mystery. I am shooting for about 38 books per year this year up from 36 last year. Ideally, I want to get to 1 per week. I like the idea of listening to books. I can do work around the yard or house listening as well! I try to read as much as I can. Other institutions have attempted to standardize their comprehensive book catalogs, among them WorldCat and the Library of Congress, but these numbers are even more likely to be assigned in multiples to the same titles due to different cataloguing rules.
Simple titles, author names, and publishing companies are less reliable still, as human error in transcribing all that information into a database can also lead to duplicates. After weeding out all the assumed duplicates, there are still certain non-book entries that need to be discarded, including two million videos, two million maps, and a turkey probe that was once added to a library card catalog as an April Fools' Day joke.
All told, Google Books came up with—drumroll, please! Though ISBNs are recommended for all titles, they are not required for self-published works carried in most e-book marketplaces, and there is no reliable system for keeping track of them otherwise.
0コメント