Education > Library books: Countries Compared

Author: Ian Graham, Staff Editor

Only 81 countries are on this list. The reason the United States and many other countries do not appear on this list could be that data was not collected, or not available. <p>According to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics table <a href= http://www.uis.unesco.org/TEMPLATE/html/HTMLTables/culture/LibrariesTertiary.htm >Selection of Indicators on Libraries of Institutions of Tertiary Education</a>, there are 3,658 college or university central libraries in the United States with combined collections of 878,906,177 volumes of books. <p>The Russian Federation, with 328,345,356 volumes of books, and Germany, with 145,781,090 volumes, are the only other countries in the table with more than 100,000,000 volumes of books in their college and university libraries. <p>Judging from this, it would be reasonable to assume that the combined number of books in all of the United States would be among the highest in the world.

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#	COUNTRY	AMOUNT	DATE
1	Georgia	76.4 million	1999
2	Russia	73.63 million	1999
3	Germany	34.69 million	1998
4	United Kingdom	27.9 million	1999
5	Romania	19.04 million	1999
6	Italy	13.19 million	1998
7	France	12.51 million	1997
8	Hungary	7.55 million	1999
9	Japan	7.31 million	1999
10	Canada	7.27 million	2000
11	Belarus	6.88 million	1995
12	Armenia	6.85 million	1999
13	Slovakia	6.04 million	1999
14	Serbia and Montenegro	5.98 million	1998
15	Spain	5.82 million	1998
16	Lithuania	5.76 million	1999
17	Czech Republic	5.6 million	1999
18	Singapore	5.42 million	1999
19	Belgium	5 million	1997
20	Denmark	4.62 million	1999
21	Ukraine	4.12 million	1999
22	Kazakhstan	3.78 million	1999
23	Azerbaijan	3.69 million	1999
24	Venezuela	3.69 million	1995
25	Mongolia	3.27 million	1999
26	Switzerland	3.11 million	1999
=27	Cuba	3 million	1999
=27	Israel	3 million	1995
29	Republic of Macedonia	2.98 million	1998
30	Kyrgyzstan	2.96 million	1995
31	Poland	2.73 million	1999
32	Portugal	2.68 million	1999
33	Moldova	2.67 million	1999
34	Netherlands	2.66 million	1998
35	South Korea	2.58 million	1995
36	Bulgaria	2.52 million	1999
37	Croatia	2.51 million	1999
38	Australia	2.44 million	1995
39	Greece	2.41 million	1997
40	Estonia	2.28 million	1999
41	Finland	2.15 million	1999
42	Norway	1.84 million	1999
43	Turkey	1.55 million	1999
44	Slovenia	1.36 million	1999
45	Philippines	1.24 million	2000
46	Malaysia	1.11 million	1995
47	Egypt	1 million	1998
48	United Arab Emirates	1,000,000	1999
49	Albania	965,000	1995
50	Iceland	840,152	1999
51	Costa Rica	824,623	1999
52	Luxembourg	800,000	1999
53	Ireland	757,048	1997
54	Jordan	706,000	1995
55	Dominican Republic	702,000	1995
56	Mexico	538,596	1999
57	Colombia	429,238	1999
58	Iran	411,000	1995
59	Monaco	317,000	1999
60	Kuwait	270,000	1999
61	Qatar	228,000	1995
62	Barbados	174,000	1995
63	Liechtenstein	167,508	1997
64	Ecuador	150,000	1995
65	Bolivia	125,036	1999
66	Oman	114,886	1999
67	San Marino	107,000	1995
68	Chile	100,752	1999
69	Zimbabwe	100,590	1999
70	Bermuda	85,000	1999
71	Cyprus	65,516	1999
72	Mali	60,315	2000
73	Sierra Leone	20,000	1999
74	Togo	19,000	1995
75	Bangladesh	14,000	1995
76	Sao Tome and Principe	8,636	1999
77	Andorra	8,000	1999
78	Benin	7,000	1995
79	Burma	4,800	1996
80	The Gambia	2,000	2000
81	Rwanda	1,197	1999

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