The year of four million books
This is the 319th edition of SHuSH, the newsletter of The Sutherland House Inc. If you’re new here, press the button—it’s free:
Sutherland House is always happy to receive submissions of manuscripts or proposals for nonfiction books. If you are looking to get published, contact submissions@sutherlandhousebooks.com. Agents welcome, but no agent required.
I’m often asked by writers about the prospects of a particular book. I try to be encouraging. If it’s a good book, there’s undoubtedly an audience for it. At the same time, I try to be realistic. It’s a crowded market and it’s often difficult even for a good book to find its audience.
If asked to explain just how crowded the market for books is today, I usually say something like, there are about two million books published in North America every year. I’m not sure where I got that figure from. Probably from some research I read five years ago.
Turns out it’s wrong. “The total number of books published in the US in 2025 with ISBN numbers jumped 32.5% over 2024 to more than four million books,” announced Publishers Weekly on March 17.
I can’t get over that number. Four million books.
An average reader might get through about 2,000 books in a lifetime. A long-lived super-reader churning through 70 or 80 a year may exceed 5,000. Gladstone’s reading logs suggest that he engaged with more than 20,000 books, but it’s not clear he read them all.
A large independent bookstore might carry between 10,000 and 30,000 books. A suburban chain store, 60,000 to 120,000. The Barnes & flagship at Union Square in Manhattan has hundreds of thousands of books on four massive floors. Powell’s City of Books in Portland, occupying an entire city block—you need a map to get from room to room—has at least a half million books, and by some counts a million. New York’s The Strand, which boasts 18 miles of books, new and used, is probably the world’s biggest bricks-and-mortar retailer: it has 2.5 million books on incredibly dense shelving. You’d need a Powell’s, a Strand, and a couple of B&N Union Squares to hold four million titles.
Four million books is equivalent in volume to the holdings of a good-sized university library system, or a large public library system—collections built over a century. And these are published in a single year.
In 1939, the year Margaret Atwood was born, The Library of Congress, widely recognized as the largest library in the world, home to a civilization’s worth of books, boasted about six million titles, including pamphlets. It’s now holding about 25 million, and the US alone is on pace to produce that many titles between now and the end of the decade.
Four million books. That’s 11,000 books a day. Four hundred and fifty books an hour.
A year ago, there were “only” 3.15 million books, traditional and self-published, released. So 2025 represents an increase of 32.5 percent. Self-publishing was up just under 39 percent. Traditional publishing about 6.6 percent. Publishers Weekly doesn’t offer much of an explanation for the explosion of new titles. AI has to be a major factor (see this week’s publishing sensation in The New York Times.)
Of course, most of the four million books are not worth your time. Only 642,242 of the titles were released by traditional publishers. A traditional publisher doesn’t guarantee quality, but it suggests a minimum of vetting. The search for merit among self-published books is easily frustrated.
Bowker, the service that counts the ISBNs (the unique thirteen-digit identifiers attached to each book), does not distinguish among formats. Many of the four million were published only as ebooks. And some books published as print, ebook, and audiobook are triple-counted. There may only be about 2.5 million distinct works in that total.
If one were to take the colouring books, planners, puzzle books, and AI-generated garbage out of the equation, we might be down to 1.5 million meaningfully distinct books. And of all those, maybe 1 to 3 percent, or 20,000 to 50,000, will sell over 1,000 copies. That puts some perspective on the four million.
But the four million matters. The ability of humans (and humans aided by machines) to create and upload book files is apparently unlimited. Meanwhile, the audience for books is stagnant, and actually shrinking relative to the growth in population and the size of the economy. The things a book needs to succeed—for instance, retail shelf space and media coverage—are not expanding to meet the increase in supply. That leaves many more titles fighting for scarce readers and resources.
It’s what people in the business call the discoverability problem. How does the audience for a given book find it? Roughly half of America’s book sales occur on Amazon, which does not much distinguish between best and worst in its presentation of product. It is clogged with books. Even if 99 percent are crap, they still exist in the system, which means they occupy metadata space, compete for keywords, dilute rankings, and trigger recommendation loops. Getting noticed is exceedingly difficult for any individual title, however worthy. To the extent that Amazon’s algorithms favour books, they favour proven sellers, the top 1 to 5 percent. Everyone else is degrees of invisible.
The knock-on effects of the over-supply of books are endless. Pricing, for instance. Most books are to an extent substitutable. An endless supply of less expensive alternatives inevitably pushes down prices. US market revenue was $28 billion in 2010. It is $32 billion now, so up 10 to 15 percent; title production has swollen from 1.5 million ISBNs to 4.2 million, almost three times more. Even if we adjust those numbers to remove the double- and triple-counting of multiple formats of individual titles, now more prevalent than in 2010, there are still about twice as many books competing for the same dollar. And there’s no reason to think that we won’t see further increases in title production in years to come as AI tools gain in adoption and proficiency.
More books means that attention cycles accelerate, leaving each title with a shorter shelf life. It’s a quick transition from frontlist to backlist, and once a book is relegated to backlist, the firehose of new product makes it all the more difficult to surface again. For all but the most successful authors, advances are likely to shrink, print runs are likely to get shorter, and marketing costs higher. On it goes.
None of this is particular to books. The costs of production and distribution of music and video are also very low, and the supply is prodigious. The whole creative economy is in transition from curated scarcity to unfiltered abundance.
I don’t know where it leads, but a few things seem likely. The number of books will continue to grow. We may be up to 10 million annually in five or ten years. And the inequality of outcomes will increase. Harsh to say, but the median book is already close to worthless economically. A substantial majority of books, looking ahead, will generate little or no revenue and receive little or no attention. It should still be possible for books with better prospects, whether due to inherent quality, the celebrity of the author, or marketing skills of the publisher, to find an audience. It will just be more difficult.
Start the year informed
As a SHuSH subscriber, you are eligible for this special offer: buy a subscription to Sutherland Quarterly (or treat a friend) and we’ll send you the Sutherland House book of your choice at no charge.
Launched in 2022, Sutherland Quarterly is an exciting new series of captivating essays on current affairs by some of Canada’s finest writers, published individually as books and also available by annual subscription—four great books a year, mailed to your door, for just $67.99. Subscribe now at sutherlandquarterly.com and we’ll immediately be in touch to send you the free book of your choice.
Sutherland Quarterly is also pleased to announce its next edition, coming January 27, will be Richard Stursberg’s Lament for a Literature, a sweeping account of how English Canada once forged a confident literary culture—and how that culture has steadily collapsed.
For decades, books provided the country’s most searching reflections on its history, politics, and identity; they shaped the national conversation and anchored a shared sense of who Canadians were. Author and media executive Richard Stursberg traces how this ecosystem emerged, flourished, and then eroded. He follows the rise of a vigorous publishing industry in the 1960s and ’70s, the period when Canadian writers reached international prominence, and the subsequent decades in which foreign ownership, shifting cultural priorities, fragile institutions, and policy failures hollowed out the sector.
Clear, forceful, and grounded in deep research, Lament for a Literature shows what happens when a nation loses the infrastructure that sustains its stories—and outlines practical reforms, including a Canadian Book Law, to rebuild the foundations of a literary culture capable of renewing itself.
Thanks for reading. Please either:
Our Newsletter Roll (suggestions welcome)
Banuta Rubess’s Funny, You Don’t Look Bookish, reviews five books a week.
The Bibliophile from Biblioasis, an independent publisher based in Windsor.
The Literary Review of Canada’s Bookworm, “your weekly dose of exclusive reviews, book excerpts, and more.”
Art Kavanagh’s Talk about books: Book discussion and criticism.
Gayla Gray’s SoNovelicious: Books, reading, writing, and bookstores.
Esoterica Magazine: Literature and popular culture.
Benjamin Errett’s Get Wit Quick, literature and other fun stuff
Lydia Perovic’s Long Play: literature and music.
Jason Logan’s Urban Color Report: adventures in ink (sign-up at bottom of page)
Anne Trubek’s Notes from a Small Press: like SHuSH, but different
Art Canada Institute: a reliable source of Canadian arts info/opinion
Kate McKean’s Agents & Books: an interesting angle on the literary world
Rebecca Eckler’s Re:Book: unpretentious recommendations
Anna Sproul Latimer’s How to Glow in the Dark: interesting advice
John Biggs Great Reads: strong recommendations
Steven Beattie’s That Shakespearean Rag, a newsy blog about books and reading
Mark Dykeman’s How About This: Atlantic Canadian interviews and thoughts on writing and creativity.
J. W. Ellenhall’s 3-Page Book Battles: Readers help her choose which of three random books to review each month.
Donald Brackett’s Embodied Meanings: “Arts music films literature and popular culture.”
I'm overjoyed by the conjunction between my pleasure in the arts and access to them. As KW says, "the whole creative economy is in transition from curated scarcity to unfiltered abundance.” Our mind’s work is to apply the filter. Rigorous selection, if unwisely advertised, may be interpreted as exclusion. If I’m going to read a few books, why should I care if there are four or ten million more that I’m not? I need time to contemplate what I have read, and, for that matter, what I have seen and heard. I am not dispirited that millions of people are expressing themselves and publishing for their pleasure, even in hope of profit, and, commonly, to record themselves or their families. My filter eliminates concern about other people’s choices.
This news has depressed me far more than it should. More than all the other stuff going on, amazingly.