News & Trends: Fast Stats

50,000

Number of copies of Stieg Larsson's "Millennium" crime series—which includes "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," "The Girl Who Played With Fire" and "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest"—being sold approximately each day in the United States.

Source: The Canadian Press, July 12, 2010

129,864,880

The number of books in the world, as defined and estimated by Google, which is trying to digitize all of them. Leonid Taycher, a Google software engineer, explained how the company came to that number in an Aug. 5 blog posted entitled, "Books of the world, stand up and be counted! All 129,864,880 of you," which was posted at booksearch.blogspot.com. For more information on how Google defines a book, visit http://bit.ly/AllBooks

22 percent

Portion of all e-book sales that are sold on Apple's iPad, the company's chief executive, Steve Jobs, told an audience at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June. That percentage does not reflect the entire publishing industry, a June 7 New York Times article, "Why Apple's iBooks Numbers Are Meaningless," pointed out: "Most small publishers, along with one of the largest in the world, Random House, do not sell books through Apple," the article stated.

143

Number of Kindle books Amazon.com has sold for every 100 hardcover books in its second quarter, which ended June 30. According to the online retailer, this includes sales of hardcover books where there is no Kindle edition available; free Kindle books are excluded.