It seems to be a hot story of the moment, in the British press, anyway: There are a lot of books being published nowadays. Robert McCrum, in his column for The Observer, quotes an expert saying, “The reading of books . . . is growing arithmetically; the writing of books is growing expontentially. If our passion for writing goes unchecked, in the near future there will be more people writing books than reading them.” Rosemary Goring, in an article for The Herald, cites a book by Gabriel Zaid, who says there’s “a new book published every 30 seconds.” Are there too many books being published?