Do They Really Publish a Million Books a Year?

Recently I have seen it estimated that, excluding self-published titles, between 500,000 and 1 million new titles are published in the U.S. each and every year.

I have tried digging into the figure but do not know how it was arrived at--and strongly suspect that it is misleading.

After all, when you collect statistics you have to define your terms clearly, and I have seen no such definition in connection with these figures. My guess is that they refer to any published item distributed in a discrete unit, excluding periodicals--which could easily include many things we do not think of as books, especially if commercial distribution is not required for inclusion in the category, such as pamphlets handed out by political or religious organizations. Even when we define the term "book" more exclusively there is the question of how we define "new." Does a barely touched "new" edition of an older book count--like a reissue of a classic with a couple of pages of "foreword?"

One can go on and on like this, but I think this makes the point--those things most of us think of when we hear the word "book," in length and formatting and manner of presentation to the public (and certainly expectation that they will find a new audience), and certainly "new book," actually hitting the market in any given year, probably number a good deal less than that. Certainly the number of, for example, new, first-edition novels published annually through the traditional channels would seem far fewer--and we do well to remember that when attempting to consider the shape of the market.