Books are inherent in human kinds' quest for knowledge, self-improvement, and sharing of information. Spanning from the beginning of language and storytelling, the spoken word embodied on the former technological revolution of paper has been key to disseminating knowledge and sharing learning, creativity, and experience throughout generations of people.
Like many, I love reading books! and I have pondered the question about reading all the books but quickly find the limits of my humanity. Let's look at some numbers:
Average length of a novel: 60,000 to 80,000 words
Average reading speed: about 200 words per minute
Let's take 60,000 words and divide that by 200. This gives us about 300 minutes per novel or about one novel every 5 hours. Let's be generous and call this one book per day.
Now let's estimate how many books can be read in a lifetime. Again we will be generous and say you are reading (novel length) books by the age of five.
With one book a day, every day of the year (365 days) and a lifespan of about 70 years, we come into the neighborhood of 23,000 to 24,000 books as a total estimate of human book reading capability.
According to the Google Books Project, there are about 130,000,000 unique books in the world which would place a very dedicated human to only reading about 0.02% of all the books out there.
Some time ago we have exceeded our ability to share stories and knowledge. Include human frailties such as cognition abilities of written words, sick days, and language barriers and it paints a clear picture of an area where help is needed.
Being absorbed in books all day and every day also does not represent actions taken from what is learned (which is about 70%) as this would ironically take away from our total amount of time to read.
Some topics to explore are purposeful prioritization of time (with a limited lifespan) in addition to augmentations to human shared knowledge and shared experience.
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