Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rosstex 77 days ago
This makes it feel like there aren't many books in the world
2 comments

There are 101,000,000 books visualized. Another way of looking at it is how incredible it is that we can catalogue (and archive) so much of humanity's writing.
That's funny, I came out of it with the opposite impression.

In the section for my native tongue, I zoomed in a few times, here and there, and I only once did I stumble upon an author I knew.

To me, writing a book feels like such a monumental endeavor that I find it hard to fathom the amount of collective effort that it took to write all this, especially considering how most of these works are almost forgotten by now (something something power law).