Complex Numbers

Read All the Books

This one's just an interesting hypothetical question, though not so much for the question or answer, but for the approach to it.

      Was It Ever Possible For One Person To Read Every Book Ever Written (in English)?  
Randall Munroe Provides a Serious Answer To a Very Hypothetical Literary Question

Munroe is the guy who does the excellent nerdy webcomic xkcd  , and also answers questions like this in book format.

The obvious, simple, and trivial answer to the headline question is "yes" (unlike most headline questions), because at the very least, once the first book was written in English, one person could then read every book ever written in English.

But then you have to define "English," which can be tricky, because languages don't generally spring, Athena-like, from the head of some creator, but evolve over time and by mixing languages together. You've probably heard of Old English, Middle English, etc., but the boundaries between them are pretty arbitrary.

The actual question:

“At what point in human history were there too many (English) books to be able to read them all in one lifetime?”
–Gregory Willmot

To take a stab at summarizing the beginning of the article, you'd need to know how fast someone can read as well as at what point the sum total of English literature, in a form that can be defined as a "book," exceeded the amount that someone can read in a lifetime. As Munroe puts it at the beginning:

This is a complicated question.

And the answer is also complicated, but I'm afraid you'll have to read the article itself to find it. Again, the way he gets at an estimate is the interesting part. And it gets into things like writing speed, too, which should be relevant to readers here.

There's also the question Munroe himself poses, which is probably more germane to reality:

On the other hand, how many of them would you want to read?

Fair point.