Book Links
Do you know how many books are there on the Internet? There are numerous movements for scanning and OCRing books around the world (besides older initiatives like the Project Gutenberg and sites like BlackMask). So I estimate that currently, there are in excess of 100,000-500,000 books on the Internet. (Of course, this is a wide range, but I can't be any more exact.) Also, please note that I mean publicly available books (though not all legal), since there may be thousands of books in the publishers' sites that are not available to the public.
Recently, I have spent a lot of time in extracting book links from the Internet. As an example, the links for the book "Flatland" by Edwin A Abbott are given below (not all the links may be active now):
Note: I am not sure if downloading these links is legal. Giving these links is for informational purposes only.
Now, I thought of an interesting thing to do. I have a collection of ca. 40,000 book links. I counted the number of occurrences for each author among them. This is a partial result of this statistics (some books, like Star Trek series, with indeterminate authors have been omitted):
| Author | Count |
|---|---|
| King, Stephen | 553 |
| Asimov, Isaac | 524 |
| Lovecraft, HP | 379 |
| Heinlein, Robert A | 349 |
| Lem, Stanislaw | 334 |
| Grant, Maxwell | 292 |
| Simak, Clifford D | 284 |
| Clarke, Arthur C | 239 |
| Harrison, Harry | 231 |
| Bradbury, Ray | 224 |
| Sheckley, Robert | 221 |
| Balzac, Honoré de | 208 |
| McCaffrey, Anne | 193 |
| Niven, Larry | 185 |
| Andersen, Hans Chiristian | 182 |
| Fitzgerald, F Scott | 180 |
| Grimm, Hermanos | 178 |
| Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan | 163 |
| Zelazny, Roger | 158 |
| Pohl, Frederik | 145 |
| Asprin, Robert Lynn | 138 |
| Silverberg, Robert | 136 |
| Anderson, Poul | 133 |
| Borges, Jorge Luis | 133 |
| Dick, Philip K | 132 |
| Foster, Alan Dean | 132 |
| Burroughs, Edgar Rice | 127 |
| Norton, André | 119 |
| Le Guin, Ursula Kroeber | 115 |
| Card, Orson Scott | 111 |
| Twain, Mark | 108 |
| Dickens, Charles | 106 |
| Ellison, Harlan | 103 |
| Shakespeare, William | 103 |
| Dumas, Alexandre | 102 |
| Farmer, Philip José | 101 |
| Christie, Agatha | 99 |
I wonder if this list also reflects the global trend of reading authors, or if it is affected by other factors, as well. Of course, in collections like the Project Gutenberg, only books with expired copyright span are published. But sporadic scanners do not obey laws as rigidly, so that the newest books of famous authors are published on the Web after only a few days of their publication (e.g., "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" by JK Rowling was published on the Internet just a few days after its official release date).
