New Technology World

“At what point in human history were there too many (English) books to read them all in a lifetime?”
– Gregory Wilmot
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This is a complicated question. Accurately counting the number of books in existence at different periods in history is very difficult, almost impossible. For example, when the Alexandria library caught fire, many books were lost. ikura Lost writes are hard to pinpoint. From 40,000 he is estimated to have up to 532,800 scrolls. Other writers have called these figures rather implausible.

Researchers Eltjo Buringh and Jan Luiten van Zanden used historical book inventories to compile statistics on the number of books (or manuscripts) published annually by region. According to their figures, the rate of publication in the British Isles, around 1075 AD he may have passed one manuscript per day.

Most of the manuscripts published in 1075 were not in English, nor were the English variants common at the time. In 1075, English literature was generally written in Latin and French, even in areas where Old English was commonly spoken on the streets.

stories to compose canterbury tales (written in the late 1300s) was part of the movement towards native English as a literary language. It’s technically written in English, but it’s not exactly legible to the modern eye.

“Wepyng and Waylyng, care and other solutions
I know nogh, even and a-morwe”
woo the merchant and say, ‘And so do other moments
it was married.

(If your 9th grade English teacher is reading this, don’t worry, I’m just joking. I totally get the point.)

Even if we knew how many manuscripts were published in a year, to answer Gregory’s question we would need to know how long it would take to publish. read Manuscript.

Instead of trying to figure out how long all the lost books and manuscripts are, you can step back and take a longer view of things.

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Tolkien wrote Lord of the Ring So he wrote an average of 125 words per day, or less than 0.085 words per minute.Harper Lee wrote 100,000 words to kill a mockingbird In two and a half years, that’s an average of 100 words per day, or 0.075 words per minute.ever since to kill a mockingbird is her only published book, and her lifetime average is 0.002 words per minute, or about 3 words per day.

Some writers are significantly faster. Author Corinterrado published thousands of romance novels in the mid-to-late 20th century, and every week he sent one to publishers. For most of her career, she published well over a million words a year, and for most of her life she averaged two words a minute posted.

It is reasonable to assume that the speed ranges of historical writers were similar. He may point out that typing on a keyboard is more than twice as fast as writing a manuscript by hand. But typing speed is not the writer’s bottleneck. After all, at a typing speed of 70 words per minute, it should only take you 24 hours. to kill a mockingbird.

The bottleneck in writing a book is how fast our brain organizes, creates, and edits stories, so typing and writing speeds are vastly different. This “storytelling speed” probably changes much less over time than our physical writing speed.

This will allow us to more accurately estimate when we have too many books to read. If the average writer falls somewhere between Harper’s Lee and Corinterrad over his lifetime, then over his lifetime he is likely to generate 0.05 words per minute.

The average person can read 200-300 words per minute. Reading a book 16 hours a day at 300 words per minute would allow Harper Lee to keep up with a world that includes an average population of 100,000 and Corinterados of 200.

Estimates that writers are generating 0.1 to 1 word per minute during their active period, one dedicated reader could keep up with a population of about 500 or 1,000 active writers . The answer to Gregory’s question was the date there were too many English books to read in a lifetime, and it happened at some point before the population of working English writers reached several hundred. At that point, it became impossible to keep up.

magazine seed It is estimated that the total number of authors reached this point around 1500 and has continued to grow rapidly since then. Soon after, the number of active British authors passed this threshold around Shakespeare’s time, and the total number of English books probably exceeded his lifetime reading limit at some point in the late 1500s.

On the other hand, how many of them do you I want read? Visit goodreads.com/book/random to see a semi-random sample of what to read. Here’s what I came up with:

School Decentralization in the Context of Globalizing Governance: An International Comparison of Grassroots ResponsesHolger Down

Povoigne (Dragon Age #2) by David Gayder

Introduction to Vegetation Analysis: Principles, Practice, and Interpretationby David R. Corston

AACN Critical Care Essentials Pocket HandbookMarian Churay

National Justice and National Sins: Contents of a discourse given at the Presbyterian Church in South Salem, Westchester, New York, November 20, 1856by Aaron Radnor Linsley

Phantom of the Auditorium (Goosebumps #24) by RL Stine

High Court #153; Summary of Debtor and Creditor Cases – To Fit Warrenby Dana L. Bratt

suddenly ran out of timeEmil Gawerk

What I’ve read so far is a Goosebumps book.

You may need to enlist help to get through the rest.

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excerpt from what if? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Ridiculous Hypothetical Questions By Randall Munro. Copyright © 2022. Available from Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.