150 millions books have been published, according to the estimate I asked ChatGPT for. Around 70 million have been digitized, but 70% of those are neither in the public domain nor commercially available in print.
This means that 80 million books are hard to access because they haven’t been digitized, and another 50 million have been digitized but can’t be accessed because they’re copyright. Only 20 million are digitally available and can be accessed in full.
You may think that “only” does some heavy lifting here, since it’d take more than 1,000 lifetimes of nothing than reading to go through 20 million books. Counterpoint: This also means that most books on any specialized subject aren’t as easily accessible as they could be. It’s inconceivable that this isn’t holding us back. This article on Asterisk has more on the problem and proposes a solution.
Nehaveigur 