[{"id": 393678, "created": "2024-06-04T07:24:39.737079", "project_id": 193, "task_id": 453109, "user_id": 300, "user_ip": null, "finish_time": "2024-06-04T07:30:42.092135", "timeout": null, "calibration": null, "external_uid": null, "media_url": null, "info": {"answer": "Based on this sample, roughly 25% of everything Bowkers categorized as Fiction could possibly be a novel. That takes the initial figure of 18.9 million possible fictional works down to 4.8 million.", "data_id": "334c6fd6d3f947a68072fe231b89b30d", "category": "literature", "question": "How many novels are there in the world?", "answer_URLs": "https://litlab.stanford.edu/how-many-novels-have-been-published-in-english-an-attempt/", "answer_type": "partial", "input_query": "How many novels are written in the world?", "is_reliable": "very_reliable", "edited_answer": "According to Bowker's Books in Print, there were 2,714,409 new books printed in English in 2015.[1] Of these, just 221,597 (8.2%) were classified as fiction. But, based on a Nielsen report,[2] the ratio of fiction releases to sales is not one-to-one; even though only about 8% of publishing is fiction, the category accounts for 23% of all book sales. (Also worth noting here is another surprise from that report, at least from the perspective of someone cloistered in an English department: just 47% of Americans[3] buy books of any kind in any format, and a huge number of them were adult coloring books last year.)\n\nRoughly 25% of everything Bowkers categorized as Fiction could possibly be a novel. That takes the initial figure of 18.9 million possible fictional works down to 4.8 million. \n\nBut running up against this blockade (or, rather, the inflection point between diminishing returns and increasingly dubious assumptions) allowed me to pause and reflect on what we have learned at this point. We're within an order of magnitude: the total number of novels in English is closer to 5 million than 500,000 or 50 million. We also know that the floor is in the hundreds of thousands since the Library of Congress holds more than 207,000 fiction items[11] and the British Library returns over 390,000 books containing \"fiction\" anywhere in the object description.[12] For \"novel,\" those numbers are 139,000 and 66,000 respectively---surprisingly small considering the size of the corpora we have become accustomed to working with in the Lab.", "question_type": "good", "location_related": "no"}}]