[dredmorbius]

A lifetime is about 4,500 weeks.

For most people, a book is probably a multi-week investment, though lighter fare can go quicker. You can also skim, or read segments only, or quit bad books quickly. I recommend each of these where appropriate.

There are roughly 300,000 "traditionally" published books printed each year in the United States (Bowker ISBN registrations), a million or three including self-published. The US Library of Congress has 40 million catalogued titles, and Google estimated about 140 million books published (through its Google Books project) as of 2015 or so. You will sample only a tiny portion of the world's literature.

The most-read books of all time are, in rough order: The Bible, the Quran, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, all reporting (with various degrees of precision and accuracy) ~0.5 -- 5 billion copies), then possibly Cervantes Don Quixote, and the Harry Potter series. Three of those, at least, are principally propaganda, in the original and/or modern senses.

A well-established historical novel may sell roughly 200 million or so copies, as with A Tale of Two Cities or The Little Prince.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books>

The Facebook (and now TikTok) homepages and/or app screens now dwarf these.

Quantity ... has its benefits, but also disadvantages. "Of the reading of books there is no end" says The Preacher in Ecclesiastes.

I recommend reading well, I've suggested Great Books as at least a good starting library, though my other suggestion is to have a good guiding question and to follow that.

Keep in mind that following recent trends, news, gossip, etc., can engross all your time and attention with very little long-term staying value. I don't remain wholly ignorant of what's happening, but I try to dip very lightly from that pitcher.

From a recent comment of mine: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32669503>

[Thrymr]

> The most-read books of all time are, in rough order: The Bible, the Quran, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, all reporting (with various degrees of precision and accuracy) ~0.5 -- 5 billion copies)

Surely the Bible is among the most un-read books in history as well, with all of the copies sitting in hotel rooms and on family shelves unopened.

[dredmorbius]

Interesting suggestion, though it'd be interesting to see how that varies across titles with copies.

A book selling one copy which is never read would have a higher percentage-unread.

Otherwise, as total copies increase, the absolute magnitude of unread copies would likely increase proportionately.

Keep in mind that copies presented to multiple potential readers (as with, say, Gidion's Bible, typically found in hotel rooms) would likely have a greater chance of being opened at least once over its lifetime.

There's also the interesting question suggested: what book has the highest readers-per-copy ratio? And how should that be scaled by total readers? I'm inclined on general principle to suggest the ratio * log(n) where n is total copies produced. That penalises very low sales volumes, but discounts greater total print runs.

I'd suspect it would probably be a romance novel.