Books | Top 20 Book Facts | Publishing Industry Trends | Friends of the South Australia State Library

Top 20 Book Facts

1.   Did you know, the fear of running out of something to read is called Abibliophobia

2.   The world’s smallest book is Teeny Ted from Turnip Town

3.   There are four law books bound in human skin at the Harvard University Library

4.   Fact has it that former American President Theodore Roosevelt read one book a day

5.   People say the longest sentence to ever be printed in literature belongs to Victor Hugo. The claim is that in Les Misérables there is a sentence which is 823 words long

6.   1 in 5 adults around the world cannot read or write

7.   Up to 50 books can be made from 1 tree

8.   Copies of pulped Mills and Boon novels were used to build part of the M6 toll road

9.   The most expensive book in the world is Codex Leicester by Leonardo Da Vinci. It was purchased by Bill Gates for 30.8 million dollars

10.  In America, the most banned books are Harry Potter. The apparent reasons are because they promote witchcraft, they set bad examples and are too dark

11.  To write a novel, it takes around 475 hours

12.  The Holy Bible, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung and Harry Potter are the 3 most read books in the world

13.  A study found that you are 2 ½ times less likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in later life if you read regularly

14.  Mark Twain’s, Adventure of Tom Sawyer is said to be the first novel written on a typewriter

15.  There is an actual word for loving the smell of old books, it’s Bibliosmia

16.  The author of Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie gave the rights of this book to Great Ormond Street Hospital

17.  On estimate, there are over 900,000 new books published each year

18.  The earliest known written existence of the word ‘book’ is in a book by Alfred the Great

19.  Lord of the Ring author, J.R.R Tolkien typed the whole trilogy with just two fingers!

20.  In Sydney, 2012 a record was made for the most people to balance books on their head, 998 people

A Decade of Change: Publishing Industry Trends

  • Independent bookstores are on the rise
  • Ebooks fell in popularity
  • Audiobooks are poised to overtake ebooks
  • Novels and short stories lose some steam
  • Poetry returns to previous popularity
  • Nonfiction titles blow past fiction
  • Self-publishing is here in a big way

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