I think this is going to turn out to be the month a lot of people realize that industry statistics–long an imperfect set of measures–are struggling mightily in mapping the complex and booming body of content that has some relationship to “books.” Earlier this week Bowker released preliminary statistics on new titles published during 2008, making a distinction between “traditional book publishing” and “on-demand/short-run” books. (The split was actually introduced last year, but drew more attention this year as title growth in the latter category more than doubled to 285,000 titles, making it larger than the “traditional” segment’s 275,000 titles.) […]
