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What you should know about this indicator

  • Data is compiled from a combination of bibliographic sources (national bibliographies, library catalogues and UNESCO statistics) that count new book titles, and academic sources (journal articles, working papers, and scholarly reference books) that provide book-production estimates and population figures.
  • The data includes historical states such as the USSR and Yugoslavia.
New book titles published per million people
Fink-Jensen (2015)
The number of new book titles published per year, per million inhabitants.
Source
Jonathan Fink-Jensen, IISH Data Collection (2015) – with minor processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
July 16, 2026
Date range
1500–2009
Unit
book titles per million people

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Jonathan Fink-Jensen, IISH Data Collection – Book Titles per Capita

Number of new book titles published per year, per million inhabitants, for countries over the period 1500–2009. Compiled from a combination of datasets and publications on book production for different regions and periods, including CLIO Infra data.

Retrieved on
July 16, 2026
Retrieved from
https://datasets.iisg.amsterdam/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=hdl:10622/AOQMAZ
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Fink-Jensen, Jonathan (2015). Book Titles per Capita. IISH Data Collection. https://datasets.iisg.amsterdam/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=hdl:10622/AOQMAZ

Number of new book titles published per year, per million inhabitants, for countries over the period 1500–2009. Compiled from a combination of datasets and publications on book production for different regions and periods, including CLIO Infra data.

Retrieved on
July 16, 2026
Retrieved from
https://datasets.iisg.amsterdam/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=hdl:10622/AOQMAZ
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Fink-Jensen, Jonathan (2015). Book Titles per Capita. IISH Data Collection. https://datasets.iisg.amsterdam/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=hdl:10622/AOQMAZ

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: New book titles published per million people”, part of the following publication: Max Roser and Hannah Ritchie (2023) - “Books”. Data adapted from Jonathan Fink-Jensen, IISH Data Collection. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260716-170123/grapher/new-books-per-million.html [online resource] (archived on July 16, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Jonathan Fink-Jensen, IISH Data Collection (2015) – with minor processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

Jonathan Fink-Jensen, IISH Data Collection (2015) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “New book titles published per million people – Fink-Jensen (2015)” [dataset]. Jonathan Fink-Jensen, IISH Data Collection, “Book Titles per Capita” [original data]. Retrieved July 21, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260716-170123/grapher/new-books-per-million.html (archived on July 16, 2026).

Download

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Download the data shown in this chart as a ZIP file containing a CSV file, metadata in JSON format, and a README. The CSV file can be opened in Excel, Google Sheets, and other data analysis tools.

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Data API

Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.

Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/new-books-per-million.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/new-books-per-million.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/new-books-per-million.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/new-books-per-million.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/new-books-per-million.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/new-books-per-million.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/new-books-per-million.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/new-books-per-million.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear