How many books have been written

James Patterson is a best-selling author who has been praised for his minimalistic prose and brief chapters. He has the perfect book to suit every reader. Continue reading to learn more about Penn Book. James Patterson is the most popular American thriller author.

James Patterson is a hugely popular author with over million copies sold worldwide. Patterson is well-known for his captivating stories and unique twists that are hard to put down. After weeding out all the assumed duplicates, there are still certain non-book entries that need to be discarded, including two million videos, two million maps, and a turkey probe that was once added to a library card catalog as an April Fools' Day joke. All told, Google Books came up with—drumroll, please!

Though ISBNs are recommended for all titles, they are not required for self-published works carried in most e-book marketplaces, and there is no reliable system for keeping track of them otherwise. As the popularity of self-publishing increases, with nearly half a million new titles released in alone, the Google Books algorithm only gets further from reality. Until Google updates its methodology, we can at least do a little extrapolation with the data we have to figure out a more accurate number of published books in existence in Feel free to just provide example sentences.

Report copyright infringement. The owner of it will not be notified. Only the user who asked this question will see who disagreed with this answer. Read more comments. Among novelists who have had large numbers of unique books printed, James seemed to me like he ought to rank quite highly considering his prolific output.

Predictably, Shakespeare appears at the top of the list. But quite a few of these placements surprised me: Twain has been printed far more than other 19 th century novelists like Austen, Eliot, and Melville, who also wrote a fairly large number of books.

Faulkner and Hemingway appear surprisingly far down the list, being published more like J. Rowling than Fitzgerald, Woolf, and Cather. If we had the data, we could get novel counts for a list of highly printed novelists against their total number of novels and subtract overprinting from the total. But running up against this blockade or, rather, the inflection point between diminishing returns and increasingly dubious assumptions allowed me to pause and reflect on what we have learned at this point.

I also reflected on whether and how this figure relates to my initial question, considering the data that is actually available. Imprecise, presentist, and biased toward the published and the archived as it may be, what does having an order of magnitude tell us about the genre of the novel? To answer that question, it helps to think about that number from the perspective of the reader who opened this essay. Literary critics, by contrast with this imagined reader, might know novels quite well, giving them purchase on somewhere between 0.

The question that emerges and one that cannot be addressed in this space is whether so little is, in fact, enough.