Anyone can now make and distribute video world-wide at zero incremental cost. That’s a mind-boggling video communication revolution.
Google’s recent heroic effort to count the number of books that have been published around the world shows how scarce video has been. Google estimates tomes — symbolically distinguished, printed and bound works — to number 146 million. Google also estimates the number of video works in library catalogs to be about 2 million.[*] Hence the number of video works equals less than 2% of the number of tomes that the world’s libraries hold.
Other public library statistics indicate popular interest in video. U.S. public libraries’ video holdings amounted in 2008 to 5.4% of total items held. These item counts include duplicates of works within a library and across libraries. The higher video item share compared to the video work share suggests that U.S. libraries include more duplicate video items than duplicate print items from the world population of tomes and videos. Moreover, U.S. libraries’ video circulation accounts for about 30% of total item circulation in 2010. The higher circulation share compared to item share for videos indicates that videos are borrowed more frequently than other items.
Public library holdings represent institutionally authorized items. Commercial video rentals, which are about five times as numerous as video borrowing from public libraries, are institutionally authorized through a different process than are public library holdings. The vast video libraries on YouTube and other video sharing sites typically have little institutional authorization. Institutions are as much a part of reality as is human nature. Institutions change much more rapidly than human nature, but much more slowly than human behavior. Public libraries as institutions almost surely will endure. But the share of video works distributed through public libraries probably will increase greatly.
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[*] These are rough, imperfect estimates, but they seem to be the best available data-based figures that currently exist. Complaining about statistics is easy. Analyzing data and calculating statistics are difficult, but useful.