That was then, and this is now.

[lloydwood]

These figures are doing the rounds today, so I attempted to ascertain their provenance. This is as far as I got.

It is estimated that 200,000 academic journals are published in the English language, and that the average number of readers per article is five.
-- Noel Malcolm, Sinking in a sea of words, The Independent (reprinted from Prospect), 21 July 1996.

What's the source of the original estimate? What are the numbers fourteen years later? Why am I even asking this on a blog with no readers?