The books you never got around to reading

Every book has its own page count, and every language has its own specific number of words available to play with. It makes me wonder... will we eventually hit a limit? Will there ever come a day when every possible story has been told and every combination of words has been used, meaning no new books can ever be written again?

rowdyhawk99 said:Every book has its own page count, and every language has its own specific number of words available to play with. It makes me wonder... will we eventually hit a limit? Will there ever come a day when every possible story has been told and every combination of words has been used, meaning no new books can ever be written again?

That’s just not how it works. New words pop up all the time and old ones just... die out. Language is basically one big living metaphor—it's endless. There's no limit to the word count.

mistyfox812 said:That’s just not how it works. New words pop up all the time and old ones just... die out. Language is basically one big living metaphor—it's endless. There's no limit to the word count.

I have to be honest, I’m not really satisfied with that answer.😢I actually brought this up once with a buddy of mine who works as a philosopher, and he told me my line of thinking was just "raw positivism." So, let me try rephrasing the question: our language has a set number of sounds, which means we have a finite number of letters and characters. Even a book has a specific number of pages—I mean, nobody is actually printing a billion-page novel, right? Following that logic, is it possible to eventually exhaust all possible topics? I'm looking for more of a "positivist" perspective here. While I agree with what you said about language being fluid and metaphorical 🙂 , it feels a bit too much like saying "the human spirit is infinite"—and I’d rather not get all metaphysical on you. Has anyone actually tackled this problem before? Are there any formal studies or conclusions out there regarding this kind of thing?

Look, this is pure combinatorics, not some deep philosophy session. But hey, like Heraclitus said, ''the man who turns toward the wise (the philosopher) must be a master of many things!'' 🙂 🙄
I haven't totally lost my mind, I swear...

So, say you’ve got two characters (A and B) and three empty slots to fill. Here are all the possible combos:
AAA
AAB
ABA
BAA
ABB
BAB
BBA
BBB.
That makes eight different combinations right there. Mathematically, that's just two to the third power equals eight. Basically, two characters and three
slots.

Let's scale this up. Say an average page of text has about 3,000 characters. And let's say a book is roughly 100 pages. That gives us 3,000 x 100 = 300,000 characters.
If we assume there are 30 letters, plus spaces and punctuation—let's call it 40 unique characters total. The number of different 100-page books possible would be 40 to the 300,000th power. That number is somewhere around 10 to the 480,000th power
(my calculator just gave up on me, so I'm eyeballing the math here). That's the total amount of unique 100-page books out there. 😲

Now, if one new 100-page book was published every single second, it would take 10 to the 480,000th power seconds for your scenario to actually play out. 🤣

Sure, a book has a set number of pages, and yeah, every language has a specific word count too.

But I think you’re overlooking one massive thing that both books and languages share: context.

See, any piece of writing only really starts making sense when you look at the context surrounding it.

And when you think about it, a language is such a living, breathing, dynamic system where meanings shift constantly and new slang pops up out of nowhere all the time.

If we really want to take this to the extreme—and I love a good thought experiment—you could ask if the total number of ways to arrange words in a standard 400-page novel is finite. Of course it is! And if you handed a supercomputer a task to churn through every single possible permutation of those words, sure, among those billions upon billions of combinations, you’d eventually stumble upon the greatest masterpiece ever written. But even then, it would only be a masterpiece within its own specific context.

So, if we just shuffle every possible context with every possible string of text... we'll eventually hit on the absolute greatest works of literature for their specific era and place.

But honestly, that’s basically what writers do every single day. They take the finite vocabulary they know and they sift through it, tossing out almost everything else to craft something they feel actually matters within the context they're working in.

In a way, authors are just literary critics who act as their own gatekeepers, rejecting all the combinations that don't work and holding onto the ones that truly sing.

rowdyhawk99 said:Every book has its own page count, and every language has its own specific number of words available to play with. It makes me wonder... will we eventually hit a limit? Will there ever come a day when every possible story has been told and every combination of words has been used, meaning no new books can ever be written again?

Your whole premise about words being the primary factor is flawed (logic isn't quite clicking there).
Words—you know, concepts and abstractions—are just labels we slap onto things in the real world.

If you strip this down to its core, the real question is: is any human actually omniscient?

Now you can go ahead and answer 😉

Every book has a set number of pages and every language has a finite number of words. Will all possible books ever be written, and will there come a day when it becomes impossible to write a single new one?

There’s an old song that starts off by saying life itself writes the novels...

so, if you ask me, it’s just impossible for every book to ever be finished or for us to hit a wall where nothing new can be created, because even if the words stay the same, everything feels brand new to every new pair of eyes that reads it.

So—is it possible to exhaust every single topic (if that's even how you'd put it)?

I mean, could we really run dry on just one subject, like love, let alone every topic under the sun?

Anyway, I stumbled upon this fantastic article based on a lecture by Umberto Eco that dives right into this exact dilemma. From the Internet to Johannes Gutenberg.

Here are a few quick snippets from it:

"Let's move toward a freer society where free creativity coexists with the interpretation of texts. I like that. But we shouldn't claim we've simply replaced the old with the new. Thank God, we have both."

Because...

"In the history of culture, it has never happened that one thing simply kills another; rather, one thing profoundly transforms another."

I think the answer is pretty obvious. No. Why? Because a book isn't just some specific sequence of letters and punctuation marks—which, let’s be honest, is all a book is without context anyway. It’s about the content. And content is fluid. It shifts based on the era, the setting, the author, the genre, the audience, and an endless web of intertextual rules that people can follow, break, or tweak until they actually change the language itself. That’s why trying to constantly reinvent "perfect" grammar is a waste of time. It's just a clumsy, awkward attempt to force hybrid half-phrases into existence when the natural evolution of words means some things simply won't have a direct equivalent in every language...
If you’re talking about being limited to a twenty-six letter alphabet, sure, there's a limit in theory, because there are only so many ways you can arrange those characters. If someone writes something using just A, B, and C, those three letters can only be arranged in a few ways: ABC, CBA, BCA, BAC, ACB, or CAB. But nobody writes books just to shuffle letters into combinatorial sequences. Books serve a purpose, and that purpose depends on a million different variables that make the actual arrangement of letters the very last thing on anyone's mind.

As long as people still have the drive to write and the hunger to read, we'll never run out of new books.