On CBC Radio One’s Sunday Edition this weekend (January 28th) Michael Enright asked ‘Are There Too Many Books?’:

Wander into any big box bookstore these days and you’ll encounter what one writer recently described as a “cacophony of the mediasphere”. Books, thousands of them. Books on tables, walls of books, shelf after shelf to titles. In all of Canada, only three to five thousand people buy hardcover books and yet we publish 20,000 new books each year and import a whole lot more from the US and Great Britain. The Canadian book market is considered to be one of the most saturated in the world. In the United States, over 175,000 books were published in 2005, while in the UK over 200,000 hit the market. Who is reading all these books? Are there too many books being written and put into print? When it comes to publishing, is less more?

The question was apparently a response to an editorial that ran in the December issue of Poetry Magazine written by Christian Wiman entitled “In Praise of Rareness".

Michael Enright was joined on show by Christian Wiman and industry insiders David Kent, President of Harper Collins Canada, and Diane Turbide, editorial director of Penguin Group (Canada).

Their discussion is available to download from the CBC website.

Are too many books being published? What do you think?