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Comment by DaveWalk | Hacker News Reader

The penny booksellers always fascinated me. The reporting in this piece has some interesting data: Thriftbooks sells 12 million books a year, for something like $2 per book (on the $0.01 cost + $3.99 shipping). I imagine Amazon could have some serious leverage if it wanted to.

And yet, 300,000 new books were published in 2013. Wow! Doesn't that seem like a lot? Is that maybe the source of the industry? Supply is overwhelmingly high. I know this model is the same for Hollywood and VCs, but wow. I can't imagine if 300,000 movies were released on DVD every year.

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> And yet, 300,000 new books were published in 2013. Wow! Doesn't that seem like a lot?

Isn't it amazing? And about that rate has been sustained for decades, as well. Can you imagine hundreds of thousands of books being published every year for decades? Who's writing them? How is this economicly sustainable? (If it's not, do we really need to incentivize publication with ever longer copyright?) This is why when Google Books tried to estimate how many books had ever been published, they got a lower bound of 129 million and no real idea how much off they might be.

And it's not just books, either. There's maybe 100,000 albums being released every year, which means in our lifetime we'll hit 1 billion+. The number of feature films keeps going up (4000 a year not terribly long ago). The TV industry is feeling shellshocked by just how many programs are in production now. And all these numbers seem like they must be undercounts because who is really able to track how many new songs get uploaded to Youtube every day by professionals, amateurs, and all sorts of indescribable people? And in the rest of the world like China?

> 100,000 albums being released every year, which means in our lifetime we'll hit 1 billion+

Even assuming a lifetime is 100 years, that would be only 10 million albums. There would have to be 10 million albums released per year to get to a billion in a lifetime.

I think a lot of albums don't take much effort to produce, EPs from garage bands and bedroom turntablists probably require less effort than even a trashy novel. Of course a decent number of those 300,000 new books are very low-effort affairs as well.

> There would have to be 10 million albums released per year to get to a billion in a lifetime.

Sorry, I left out that part of Kelly's estimate of 1b songs is that album rates will also continue to increase at the historical rate. It seems improbable to me that we could really hit 1.1b songs by 2060 (it's such a mindboggling number), but on the other hand, the world keeps getting wealthier, making music keeps getting cheaper, and the appetite and dreams of people for making music seems to know no limits...

That's a good point - I'd really be interested in someone modeling/visualizing the size of the primary market vs. the secondary market.

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