Comment by philipallstar
5 hours ago
Why are all these institutions so susceptible to bring led by so few people? Can't they figure out what books to get without being told?
5 hours ago
Why are all these institutions so susceptible to bring led by so few people? Can't they figure out what books to get without being told?
> Can't they figure out what books to get without being told?
Probably not? People are not "being told" what to read, they are given some opinionated advice which they can then decide to follow or not.
According to Wikipedia, 275,000 books are published each year in the US alone [0]. Most people (even excluding the many that don't read) will read well under 0.01% of that. Deciding which books to read without taking advice from someone more informed would not be optimal.
Sometimes it makes a lot more sense to rely of expert advice than to just make all decisions on your own.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_pe...
The very fact people think they need to read (fiction) books released this year more than ones released before is baffling.
Much like film you could say, but the backlog of books spread across millennia, not a century.
> The very fact people think they need to read (fiction) books released this year more than ones released before is baffling.
Do they really?
I was comparing rates of production vs consumption. It doesn't follow that what is being consumed on a given year is this year's production.
My guess is that most of the books written are read by hardly anyone. A few authors have a faithful following that will read their books as soon as it's out (which isn't too baffling). Reviewers and critics may indeed be more likely to review new books, which might impact people's decisions (again, not necessarily baffling). Book shops also put new books forward, but all those books tend to be the ones by trendy authors.
Other than the few fashionable books that come out each year you'll find reviewers like the one described in the article who don't seem to focus on new books (e.g. they talk about Dostoïevski), so it is not obvious that people feel that compelled to read new books.
> the backlog of books spread across millennia, not a century.
How much I agree with this! Plus, time does such a great job at filtering out the good from the bad (or the exceptional from the mundane). That's where lists of books entering the public domain, like this one [0], are important. Or the reviews [1].
Ultimately, the fact that there is more available to read than is possible even to the most voracious of readers means that most people will rely on guidance on what to read.
[0] https://standardebooks.org/blog/public-domain-day-2026
[1] https://publicdomainreview.org/