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Books Published

Map No. 343

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This map shows the distribution of book and pamphlet titles published, not the number of copies sold. Western Europe dominates this map due to the high number of new books and pamphlets published in 1999. A book is defined as having at least 50 pages, a pamphlet has 5 to 49 pages.

In 1999 there were a million new book titles worldwide. The most new titles were produced in the United Kingdom, China and Germany.

The highest rate of new titles being written per person living there was in the Holy See, where there were 2 new titles produced for every 10 people in one year. The world rate of new titles is 167 being published per million people per year.

"We are extremely careful about what content we bring into mainland China. For something that is very, very sensitive, we may not say anything. But at least we will not lie." Liu Changle, 2001

Territory size shows the proportion of new book titles published, that were published there.

• Open PDF poster, designed for printing. You need Acrobat Reader.
• View labelled territory map or population map for comparison
• Data files: Excel (large with map), Excel (small no map), Opendoc format (see notes)
• Technical notes for this data.
• High Resolution image (see copyright conditions)
• All of the data we use is estimated; see data page