Have you ever heard that there are more stars in the Universe then there are grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth? Very likely there are more things glittering in the Universe than all of the sand on our planet.
In December 2010, new research by Yale University astronomer Pieter van Dokkum and Harvard astrophysicist Charlie Conroy produced a staggering conclusion that our cosmos contains a mind-blowing 300 sextillion stars. That’s a 3 followed by 23 zeros! (See full article by Seth Borenstein at Huffington Post)
That is one giant sandbox!
As a writer, it had me wondering how many books have been published. That’s a pretty large sandbox as well, and I am getting ready to toss my second grain of sand onto the pile.
I did a little digging to find an answer — and it wasn’t easy. In fact, the articles on the subject that I found as the most current were only a few months before the article on stars was published. Here is a link to an article that’s been the most quoted.
According to the article and to Google’s algorithms (as of August 2010), there have been around 210 million books published in the world. But, there’s even more to the equation…
“We still have to exclude non-books such as microforms (8 million), audio recordings (4.5 million), videos (2 million), maps (another 2 million), t-shirts with ISBNs (about one thousand), turkey probes (1, added to a library catalog as an April Fools joke), and other items for which we receive catalog entries. Counting only things that are printed and bound, we arrive at about 146 million. This is our best answer today. It will change as we get more data and become more adept at interpreting what we already have.”
So, the literary sandbox from the beginning of the printed word is filled with an algorithm-calculated 146 million books (give or take a few million).
Thankfully that has far fewer zeros than the cosmic sandbox, but that’s still a lot of literary action. What that means to me is that humans love to write and most importantly…they love to read. 
I have a wonderful wallpaper on my computer’s background of David Tennant, who played the tenth Doctor in the hit BBC sci-fi show Doctor Who. If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook you’ve probably already discovered my David Tennant and BBC America addiction.
My fellow Whovians should remember a great episode called “Silence in the Library” which takes place in a 51st century book repository that covers an entire planet. This library supposedly contains all of the books ever written on all of the planets in the Universe. I would bloody well LOVE to visit that library!! (Wouldn’t you like to know what Silurian erotica is like??)
But until I find myself in an alternate universe filled with book planets, I’ll just have to enjoy many of the great stories here on the third little rock from the Sun. And I’ll add my second book (Immortal Dominion) into the literary sandbox in a few weeks.
Happy Reading!!
Eternally,
Lynda Haviland
a.k.a. Immortal Diva
(Source Credits: Photo of The Flame Nebula courtesy of NASA.gov. Wallpaper photo of David Tennant courtesy of BBC.co.uk/doctorwho)
