Tracked orbital debris objects

American self-published books and tracked orbital debris, both climbing. Two unrelated forms of accumulation: more text published on Earth, more objects compounding overhead. The decade left a lot of things in orbit, in two senses.

Self-published titles per year climbed from a few hundred thousand in 2010 to over 2 million by 2021 as Amazon KDP and falling production costs put publication within reach. Tracked orbital debris grew from about 14,500 catalogued objects in 2010 to over 26,000 by 2021. Two completely unrelated accumulation stories sharing a window because the same eleven years scaled both an open-publishing platform and a count of objects in low Earth orbit. Different stratospheres.

More content, more debris, both compounding. The decade was good at adding things and bad at removing them.