Quote:
Originally Posted by carld
Yeah, I meant to add another 0, but thinking about it, there might be millions.
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Even tens of millions could be a fraction of all books ever published. Someone at
Google estimated that there are 130 million "modern" book titles out there, although I agree with the author of my link who writes that "my gut says this number is too low." Then there are all the world's magazines and newspapers.
As to whether all this is worth reading, interests vary. Most books, not to mention periodicals, are non-fiction. I often want to read an article or book on a topic, even though there are much better articles and books on other topics.
My gut feeling is that the darknet is weighted towards fiction, and mostly for books that sold well, and thus has only a tiny percentage of what I want to read -- although I admit to not really knowing what I am talking about here. I do have plenty of evidence that the great majority of outstanding books are not available for sale, in Kindle format, at amazon.com. If you don't believe me,
check out a few randomly choosen twentieth century titles from this list. And for every one on the list I just linked, there are dozens of other history books that got good reviews that year. If it really is true that most of what's worth reading is on the darknet, the darknet must have hundreds of times more than Amazon's Kindle store. Is this plausible?