How books come and go

I found the contrast of these articles interesting. On the one hand, you Rachel Donadio pointing out that we have more books being published than ever before:

In 2007, a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from 300,000 in 2006, according to the industry tracker Bowker, which attributed the sharp rise to the number of print-on-demand books and reprints of out-of-print titles. University writing programs are thriving, while writers’ conferences abound, offering aspiring authors a chance to network and “workshop” their work. The blog tracker Technorati estimates that 175,000 new blogs are created worldwide each day (with a lucky few bloggers getting book deals). And the same N.E.A. study found that 7 percent of adults polled, or 15 million people, did creative writing, mostly “for personal fulfillment.”

Then on the other hand, you have a meditation on how books -- yes, they do, after all, remain pesky material objects, Amazon Kindles notwithstanding -- actually end up becoming dust.

Some burned, some pulped, some simply forgotten. Some stillborn in our minds, some dead of neglect, some strangled in their cradles by a critic’s contempt. We don’t mourn for books, or the life that passed into them during their creation, because we rarely know about their loss. Those that die usually do so without ceremony, like the wordless exhalations that take place each day in nursing homes, public hospitals, or prison wards, where death is an act of forgetting and a problem of remains.

I've often wondered how vanity press books will skew future historians' interpretation of our era. Then again, I guess the books that were (and were not) published have always given a skewed snapshot of any era's cultural thoughts.