How many books are there in Esperanto?

Question

I felt pretty motivated about reading Esperanto literature, especially after finding the baza legolisto, and thought "I'll cover the basics in a year!". After reading this article I felt a bit floored - and therefore my question how many books there are in Esperanto.

Answer 1

Most of the fiction published in Esperanto consists of translations. If you mean books containing fiction originally written in Esperanto, then there aren't so many: about 200 novels have been published, and 400 volumes of short stories, and some of these books are very short. We are still at the stage at which a very determined person with a lot of money could conceivably read all of them. However, the quality is uneven, so it is a good idea to start with other people's recommendations. Of the novels, about two-thirds date from after 1980. Since then the rate has been about 3½ per year. You can find a detailed list on Sten Johansson's website.

Reading fiction, both original and translated, is a good way to get comfortable with Esperanto. And it is advisable to keep a pocket dictionary on hand to look up words, as that is one of the most efficient methods of expanding vocabulary.

Answer 2

La Katalogo de UEA has about 7461 titles (or 7262, see below), if I managed to count them correctly.

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NOTE: It doesn't allow just listing all titles and requires searching by some criteria, so I tried in two ways:

1. I first picked titles with price of less than 1€ (361) and then with price of more than 1€ (7100), which makes 7461, assuming there is no overlap or missing titles.
2. I selected all titles published after year 1887 (duh), which shows 7262 titles.

In any case, there are more than 7000 books there.

Answer 3

I had read that there was a library of books translated and written in Esperanto by Montagu Butler. His library is listed first in this Wikipedia article of all books/library that are written in Esperanto.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_library