A thought crossed my head the other day… I don’t particularly consider myself a bookworm but I’ve read my fair share of books: how many books would I end up reading in my lifetime?

The Google Library

So to make it easier, I assumed there is  an (extreme) bookworm who reads on average a book a day since he was 12 fora period of 70 years. Thus, that would mean that throughout his life time he will end up reading 25,550 books. Now that’s a hefty amount of books to read!

As of the end of last August there were 168,178,719 books in the world. Given that this number remains the same for the next 70 years, you would have read 0.0152% of the books in the world, if you have read a book a day. Yet, the depressing conclusion I reached is this: it really doesn’t matter much how many books I go through but what matters the most is learning from them.

Given that Google is moving along in their creation of the last library, and they are already beyond the 10 million books mark, they will certainly give the word reading a book a whole new meaning. Just to think of the prospect of having the biggest library in the whole world search-able and accessible online! It would most certainly would make reading a book a day a lot easier.

So what do you think about reading books and the Google library? Wouldn’t you be worried if that much knowledge is listed under the name of one corporation?