129,864,880 Books: Time to Read

I have often wondered how many books I would have to read to read all of the books in the world. Obviously one lifetime wouldn't be enough.

Well, Google says there are 129,864,880. That's a lot.

Let's break it down a bit.

• The average individual in the U.S. lives to be 78.2. At that rate, the individual would need to read approximately 4,550 books a day from the cradle to the grave.
• Say an individual reads 10 books a year (which would be well above average), that person will have read about .0005% of all the world's books.
• At the pace of 52 books a year--the pace which I have set for myself for 2010--it would take 2,497,4013 years to read all of the books in the world.
• U.S. adults spend 200 billion hours watching TV a year. If 76% of Americans are over 18, that's about 886 hours of TV a year per U.S. adult. Say it takes 8 hours to read a book. If Americans all read instead of watched TV, each American could read approximately 110 books a year. At this rate, in a combined effort the U.S. adult population could read all of the books in the world in less than two days.

In summary, there's a lot of reading to do. Get at it.