TORONTO—The pile of books and magazines next to my bedside table finally started to recede over the past few weeks. I finished a few books, an issue of The New Yorker, and the 150^th anniversary edition of The Atlantic. Thinking I’d completed a rather momentous task, I quickly went online to see what else I could put on my reading list.

A book is published somewhere in the world roughly every 30 seconds. That’s another four books in the time it took me to walk in the kitchen and pour another cup of tea. By the time you’re done reading this, there will be another seven or eight. Though I am optimistic pessimist at heart, I’m guessing that one of those three books will be decent and the rest mediocre, if not outright dreadful.

And then, on top of the two books that were just published a minute ago, there’s even more to peruse online. In April, the blog aggregator Technorati tracked approximately 70 million blogs. I can also go online and read archival content from newspapers to journals to the over 100,000 titles at Project Gutenberg.

As a history student I’ve always held the belief that the more things humans record and published for all to see, the better a society would become through the education and the propagation those new ideas. Now, I’m starting to change my mind. There’s just too much out there. Where do all these books go?

Conveniently, a little bit of googling found an article in The Guardian that tells us where the books no one reads actually go — in the UK, at least. The article describes the British Library’s need to construct a massive warehouse that will house books with low circulation. This actually reminded me of the seed ark that was constructed somewhere safe and mysterious — Svalbard, Norway — where samples of the world’s seeds will be stored for future generations (or aliens, or what have you).

What would aliens actually think of our race if they came upon a mass storage facility that housed all the world’s unwanted/unused books? Imagine a well-researched thesis written by a little green being that investigates the everyday life of a human family from the perspective of a V.C. Andrews novel. Eww.

Think of poor old Leonard at the end of Howard’s End, crushed to death by his own bookcases. Mark Twain said “the man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.” It’s true — is having more things to read necessarily a good thing? Or does it just hamper us from finding the good among the bad?

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Posted on Monday, December 17th, 2007 at 10:13 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.