Zeitgeist Query on No. of books

The current Zeitgeist informs me that 2,972,846 members have catalogued 200,774,802 books.

I assume the 200 million + number refers to the number of books, not individual titles?

Does anyone know how many individual titles are catalogued at LibraryThing?

I'm curious because I added a book to my library (A Memoir of the Right Hon. William Edward Hartpole Lecky by Elisabeth van Dedem Lecky) and it ranked No. 7,609,112 in popularity.*

As am I the only member to have it in my library, ** I'm thinking 7.6 million individual titles is getting close to the title number.

It's mindboggling enough that there are 7.6 million titles, but does anyone know the actual number? Thanks, MLM

*(Which is crazy. It's such a great book!)

**(Even crazier)

>1 MartinLMorgan: The closest thing would be the number of cataloged Works (below and to the left on the Zeitgeist page).
As of just now:
"Works: 31,109,548"

A Memoir of the Right Hon. William Edward Hartpole Lecky

All the titles with only one copy would have the same popularity , such as my

Gugelhupfglück (Very good cake recipes)

>3 MarthaJeanne: As would, likewise, those with zero copies but a record in the system. (Though I'm not sure what the popularity for those might be at the moment).

I found another copy and combined them, so the popularity is now 5,180,632

>2 davidgn: Thanks. 31 million works is astounding!

>4 davidgn: That's interesting. How is popularity determined? Thanks.

>7 MartinLMorgan: Pretty sure it's the number of works which have relatively more copies cataloged (and not subsequently deleted) by members, plus 1. I welcome correction.

ETA: Here's a zero-copy work. Looks like popularity is undefined (although I suppose in theory it could be). https://www.librarything.com/work/28573659

BTW, Amazon got the author name wrong. As you correctly note above, it is Elisabeth, not Elizabeth. You might want to correct your entry.

I *think* that all the books with just one copy cataloged get a popularity number like 7,609,112 which means that there are (that many - 1) two or more copy works. And then, when the zeitgeist says there are 31,109,548 works it means that there are (31,109,548 - 7,609,112) = 23,500,436 single or zero copy works.

>9 MarthaJeanne: Did it. Thx

>10 Foretopman: Of course, if all the duplicate work records were properly combined, the number would shrink quite a lot. My wild-ass guess? 10-12 million or so. (And I'd say 99% it falls between 5 and 20 million). But really, who knows?

>12 davidgn: Oh, yes, to my mind that high number of seemingly single copy works just shows how much combining work could be done

>13 Foretopman: I just looked through some of my 800+ singletons, and have to admit that I have picked up some rather weird books over the last several decades. I am disappointed that some of the recent books remain singletons (yes, I checked) in spite of having been very interesting. But if I will buy new books in German, that will happen.Those 1 copy books aren't all just uncombined.

>13 Foretopman: Oh, yes, to my mind that high number of seemingly single copy works just shows how much combining work could be done

While you're certainly right that there is combining work to be done, I don't see that it follows from the number of single copy works. (Apologies to the non-statistics-obsessive for what follows; it's just a silly demonstration.)

For starters, consider how many published works there are in the world. A little poking around shows that, by the mid-1970s, the Library of Congress was cataloging something like 75,000 books per year. I'm told that by 2000, that had quadrupled. As a back-of-the-envelope calculation, let's say there were 10,000 books per year from 1801 to 1900; 20,000 per year 1901-1950; 50,000 per year 1950-1975; 75,000 per year 1975-2000; 200,000 per year 2001-present. That's roughly ten million books.

That excludes:
1. Anything not cataloged by the Library of Congress (that's a lot of books!)
2. Anything published before 1800
3. Audio Recordings
4. Movies
5. Magazines
6. Games
7. Sheet music
8. Anything else people catalog

I have, in my collection, 38 78 rpm disks. I did a good deal of checking on these when I entered them. I was, at that time, the only person on LT to have 36 of those 38. I have the only copy of about half the items of sheet music in my collection (there may be other arrangements of some of those songs, but not all of them, and other arrangements really should count as separate works anyway). And I am the only person to own hundreds of my books.

On this basis, there are surely many millions of single-copy items. Combination would reduce that, but perhaps not as much as we think.

>14 MarthaJeanne: Yeah, I have a number of knitting pattern booklets in Swedish - I’m the only one for most if not all of them. Same with some booklets about textile origins (also in Swedish.
I’m pretty sure those of us who read in smaller languages and have moderately niche interests or reading genres make up a fair number of the one copy books.

>14 MarthaJeanne: >15 waltzmn: I by no means meant to imply that all, or even most, of those single copy works needed to be combined. About 4% of the books in my catalog are singletons, and I believe only a very few are still in need of combining. But on the other hand hardly a day goes by without a user posting in Talk about a problem that gets solved by a little judicious combining.

>16 PawsforThought: Yeah, there's no shortage of genuine ones, but spend enough time in the long tail or in certain genres and you see another side. I'd say the majority of children's and YA materials I've been going through for awards have at least one (often several) uncombined variants with few, one, or no copies. And I'm too busy doing awards stuff to combine them unless there there is no clear dominant record, so that continues to be the case. This is for the *popular, US-published* titles.
A few more back-of-the-envelope estimates push my number up a bit closer to the 20 million end, but not out of that range.

>16 PawsforThought: I never said that the majority was anything but combinations-in-need. I’ve spent plenty of time in the genres that need combining out the whazoo.

I did perhaps a dozen combinations today on the way to books I was actually searching for. Variations on author or title are very common and prevent automatic combining. I noticed quite a few more that needed work, if I was inclined.

>18 davidgn: whats an envelope?

>21 bergs47: That was a paper pocket to put a letter into, back when people didn't have email. You know, back in the olden days. And sometimes people would use the back of old envelopes as scrap paper. Even do math problems on, because they didn't have smart phones with calculator apps.

Thx everyone. I certainly learned a lot.