So Many Books, So Few Publishers

A month or so ago, I was listening to NPR's Weekend Edition and heard a story about the demise of a book publishing house. I don't even remember which publisher it was, but I know it got me thinking about how the technology of book production is cheaper now than it's ever been, even though staying in business in the publishing industry appears to be more difficult than ever.

My sense was that there used to be a lot more publishing houses in the past, but as far as I knew, there were a lot fewer books published in those days than today -- so how did they all stay in business?

So like any good citizen of the 21st century, I looked it up in Google and found a site called Swivel.com, which has all sorts of graphs showing how many books were published in the U.S. in the last 110 years (relative to population growth and a whole bunch of other comparisons). Pretty cool.

This graph from Swivel shows the number of books published each year (in thousands). Check out the huge upswing that began in the early 1960s! Then a major dip in the early 1990s, a spike in the late 90s and a recent, fairly precipitous drop. (Perhaps that post-1990 peak is the Harry Potter phenomenon.)


An interesting take on the tribulations of book publishing can be found in a 2002 article from Salon.com.