Number of books published per year per capita by country in Europe

by Jakub Marian

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Being an author myself, I was very much interested in the number of books published in different European countries. I wasn’t able to find a good source of information, so I decided to make one myself.

The following map shows the number of books published per year per capita (or per “1 million capita”, to be more precise). Most of the data is from the years 2013 and 2012, but some of the figures are older (no more than five years). I wasn’t able to find data for some countries, which are labelled as N/A in the map. See the end of the article for sources.

Also note that the data comes from various national associations of publishers, so the titles that have not been published by a publishing house (such as self-published books, books published by private companies and state institutions, etc.) or that have been published by a publishing house that is not a member of the national association are not included in the figures. New editions (but not reprints) are included.

Edit: Denmark was removed because the data turned out to include also books not published by publishing houses. Added Latvia. The figure for Poland was corrected; there is an error in the IPA report the original figure was taken from. The figures for Estonia and Croatia were taken from a mistaken source and were changed to N/A. The source for Sweden is no longer available online, and the figure was suspicious, so it was changed to N/A.

books-published-per-capita
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The underlying blank map was made by Tindo and licensed from fotolia.com. If you want to share the map, please share a link to this webpage instead of sharing just a picture.

For those interested in the total numbers of books published, here they are:

books-published-total

Finally, the sources: The figures for Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Norway, Slovenia, Spain, Russia, Turkey, and the UK are taken from the IPA 2013 report. Other countries: Belgium, Bulgaria, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. The rest is taken from this Wikipedia article (if up-to-date enough).

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