How can we best explain the differences between the numbers of books published per country?

Here are the factors I would test:
population size
television viewing
historical rate of book sales (need to find a way to adjust for collinearity)
genre of books sold
type of governance/economy
non-textual media consumption
education level
publication profit margins
foreign book republications
number and size of publishers

Well, there you go. Gather the data and analyze it and tell me what is a good predictor and what isn’t.

Several factors occur off the top of my head:

1. The age and quality of the data set, for one thing. For example, you left off that the Wikipedia list you pulled from specifically states “for the latest year available”. Nigeria’s data point is dated 1991, which is 19 years ago. One may question how accurate the data were even then.

2. “Countries” don’t publish, but authors and publishers do, and they need an infrastructure to publish with : printers, binders, transportation and book sellers, to name a few. As you pointed out with Spain, there may be other literary sources for Nigerian readers than a domestic publishing industry.

3. Copyright law probably has a lot to do with where particular works are published. I read an interesting statistic on this myself some time ago, which I will try to resurrect when I can find the time. Apparently during Dickens’ writing time, when England was beginning to institute stronger copyright laws (Dickens’ work was often plagiarized and published without his consent—or royalties), Germany, with no copyright laws at all on the books, a smaller population and a looser federation of states, had a much more robust publishing industry, judging by the volume of works produced and the value received for them. This seems counter to what we might expect : that a place with even less “intellectual property protection” would have a stronger industry overall.

@CyanoticWasp – Comparing different years in this statistic is a minor problem. Obviously for some countries there aren’t any more up to date numbers, which might tell us something too.

Today there are copyright laws for books in Germany, but this wasn’t always so. Some seem to draw parallels to the open source software success. There was a recent Spiegel article about this

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,710976,00.html

I was reading that other Arab countries consider Iran to be Persian (I do not recall where I had read this, perhaps during my perusal of the latest Wikileaks?). At any rate, perhaps that has something to do with it? That the cultural beginnings of their society still affect people today to some degree.

In the UK everyone can read and everyone has access to a public library. Reading is encouraged by the BBC especially Radio 4 which has programmes such as Book of the Week, A Good Read, Front Row and a Book at Bedtime. Despite television and the Internet reading is still popular here and not just of mass market best sellers either.

Iran, or Persia, is one of the world’s oldest civilizations with a rich cultural heritage so it isn’t entirely surprising that publishing is still important. Presidential elections were held last year although there were doubts about the validity of the result.

@ZAGWRITER “other Arab countries consider Iran to be Persian” They aren’t “other Arab countries.” Iran isn’t an “Arab country.” Iran is “Persian” or what used to be known as Persia and Arab countries are “Arab”. “Arab” is essentially a language group. Arabs speak Arabic and while people who share a common language and a common geographical tend to have a lot of other things in common that is the essential defining characteristic of Arab; speaking Arabic. In Iran they speak Farsi.

That doesn’t really address @mattbrowne‘s question. I’ll get to that later. But @crisw has certainly gotten things off to a good start :-)

I don’t know if you can trust any of those numbers. If you look at the Wiki article and check the reference for NIgeria, who supposedly published 5 books I can’t see where the hell they got that number from their own source. Am I missing something?

Oops! I don’t know what I was thinking!!!!! For some reason I don’t understand I wrote @crisw when I was referring to @CyanoticWasp‘s comment. Please forgive. It’s my swiss cheese brain at work again. Both user names have a C, I, S and W in them, I still don’t know how I got mixed up. I just tossed of a quick addendum to my original comment and got a screwed up there.

I know its Persian. It does address his question because perhaps it is an explanation as to why Iran publishes more books, its culture’s beginnings have different roots. The U.K. I could see publishing more per capita because of its rich literary history. Maybe I should have said other Middle Eastern countries instead of other Arab countries, to avoid forcing someone that might feel a compelling desire to point out my egregious error. Forgive me. For some reason, at the time I thought my wording was a good way to respond to the question. Oops.

@ZAGWRITER I got a little worked up there, didn’t I? I did feel “compelled” to point out your “egregious” error. Sorry! Please forgive. :-)

lol, it’s all good. It probably would have been pointed out to me in class as well. Better here, right?

Yes, Persia had an advanced pre-Islamic culture. Still, I would have expected that the number of published books was declining after the revolution in 1979.

We can also use the number of Wikipedia articles per language and cross check this with the published books statistics:

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm

Click right on “article count” to get this list. The entry in the last column is the number of articles.

English 1500 M 24 9,889,432 3,455,258
German 185 M 37 1,430,338 1,144,176
French 200 M 24 864,971 1,025,634
Italian 70 M 41 573,373 750,766
Polish 43 M 37 491,742 745,231
Japanese 132 M 31 1,580,599 719,097
Spanish 500 M 8 1,396,322 667,680
Dutch 27 M 53 218,313 648,999
Portuguese 290 M 6 496,775 615,648
Russian 278 M 14 743,631 598,020
Swedish 10 M 86 114,876 370,206
Chinese 1300 M 1 68,754 319,887
Catalan 9 M 45 26,273 287,160
Norwegian 5 M 116 54,491 276,833
Finnish 6 M 108 87,980 253,528
Ukrainian 45 M 12 40,160 239,576
Hungarian 15 M 43 59,922 179,707
Czech 12 M 48 80,683 176,709
Romanian 28 M 11 39,075 152,630
Turkish 70 M 7 97,915 152,532
Korean 78 M 9 48,052 147,450
Danish 6 M 49 34,653 137,344
Esperanto 1 M 98 13,905 136,348
Serbian 12 M 16 8,104 135,680
Indonesian 250 M 0.9 72,794 134,781
Vietnamese 80 M 3 41,171 131,697
Arabic 530 M 1 73,754 130,833
Lithuanian 4 M 34 19,805 120,962
Volapü 10 600000 1,163 118,847
Slovak 7 M 20 22,554 118,558
Hebrew 10 M 70 50,084 111,571

“Still, I would have expected that the number of published books was declining after the revolution in 1979.” @mattbrowne , ahh, Good call.

Excuse me but where are you getting these fictitious numbers? I am Nigerian and I live in Nigeria, and Nigeria publishes hordes of books every year.

Wow, I knew foreign media were fond of publishing rubbish statistics about my country but this is a new low. 5 ? Really? 5???????

I took it from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_per_year

which gets updated and corrected frequently. According to the more up to date list, Nigeria published 1,314 books in 1991.