Researchers Eltjo Buringh and Jan Luiten van Zanden used historical book catalogs to put together statistics on the number of books (or manuscripts) published annually per region. Other writers call those numbers implausible in one direction or the other. Some estimates range from 40,000 books to 532,800 scrolls. For example, when the Library of Alexandria burned, a lot of writing was lost, but how much writing was lost is hard to pin down.
Getting accurate counts of the number of extant books at different times in history is very hard, bordering on impossible.
“At what point in human history were there too many (English) books to be able to read them all in one lifetime?”
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