"Minimum number of different books sold in the U.S. last year, as tracked by Nielsen BookScan: 1,446,000

Number of these that sold fewer than 99 copies: 1,123,000

Number that sold more than 100,000: 483.

So even though more than 1,000,000 books get written, few are read at any substantial level.

Few are bought for individual libraries as a percentage of the total corpus.

Now book discovery is changing.

What will be the impact of OpenWorldCat on discovery? What percentage of all books get in there? It's loaded or working in Google, Amazon, Ask, Yahoo!, MSn, etc...?

Many books are showing up in fulltext now through the Google Publisher program, Amazon, Google digitization, Project Gutenberg, Alouette Canada, the Open Content Alliance, and other digitization projects workdwide.

Are we on the edge of being able to find the unread!?"

Stephen Abram

My question is, if you can't easily buy it, borrow it, get it...will that piss you off and stop you from looking for a book, next time around? That would not be good for libraries...I already see that to some degree with PhD students.