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Comment by vintagedave | Hacker News Reader

Short summary: internet meme statistics!

> most traditionally published novels that you see on bookstore shelves or reviewed in newspapers sell several hundred to a few thousand copies across formats

This is interesting. I had envisaged tens of thousands or more. If this is US-based, and there are hundreds of millions of Americans, that is a very low ratio of book to person.

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Doesn't this partly come down to how you define most books? Like yeah, if you go to a bookstore and look at the shelves you are seeing the books that the store thinks are going to sell, not the thousands of books they chose not to stock. Most books (as in the individual physical books) created in a given year are going to be a relatively small number of best sellers.

On the plus side, you can reasonably claim that the brand new, non-bestseller, book you bought is a rare book, since "there are likely only a few hundred copies in peoples' hands* throughout the world".

*A way of skirting the fact that there are probably >1000 copies in warehouses that will be pulped at some point

Since most books are, at any given moment, probably lying somewhere and not being actively held, chances are pretty good that yours is the only copy currently in a person's hand!

two people holding the same book in their hands at the same time is so rare that you can actually feel it when it happens ;-)

Only ~70% of Americans read at least one book a year.

That's a suspicious statistic in my opinion and feels like something people would like about on a self reporting survey lol.

Is that an entire book or any part of any book? Does it count audiobooks? I know a lot of people who claim to "read" a lot of books, but they actually are listening to audiobooks.

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