The age of the oldest surviving printed work: the Diamond Sutra. This Chinese text was created by pressing woodcut blocks covered in ink onto paper.
Numbers in the News: Books
August 9 is National Book Lovers Day. Spread the joy of reading with these facts and figures about books.
KERRICK/GETTY IMAGES
1,157 YEARS OLD
1440
The year that Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press—a machine with movable tiles that made it possible to mass-produce books in Europe for the first time.
5
The number of books a typical American reads in a year.
178 MILLION
The number of items in the Library of Congress—the world’s largest library. The collection includes about 26 million books.
75,000
The number of free electronic books available through Project Gutenberg, the world’s oldest digital library, which was founded in 1971.
TAKE IT FURTHER: How many pages are in your favorite book? If you read 10 pages a day, how long would it take you to finish it?
SOURCES: PEW RESEARCH, PROJECT GUTENBERG, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
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