
Google Books Determines That There Are 128,864,880 Books In The World (For Now) - McKittrick
http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/08/05/google-books-has-determined-that-there-are-128864880-books-in-the-world-for-now/
======
mechanical_fish
Now for some math.

Assume an average of 200 pages per book.

Assume 50kB per page, based on this rather interesting document that I just
Googled:

<http://www.archivebuilders.com/whitepapers/22009p.pdf>

It multiplies out to 1200 TB to store an (admittedly fairly low quality)
black-and-white scanned image of every book page in the world.

Newegg has _external_ 2TB hard drives, at _retail_ , for $110. So the cost of
the modern Library of Alexandria, which would ship on 600 such drives, is down
to less than $66k.

I am not the richest person in my town, let alone in my state or my country,
yet I can now afford, with a relatively modest consumer loan, to own the
libraries. All of them.

And if we assume that the so-called "Kryder's Law" continues to hold:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kryder>

costs will continue to drop by 50% every two years, and the universal library
will be down to $515 -- less than the cost of my iPad -- by 2024.

How blessed I am to have lived to see this day, a day in which the ultimate
dream of history's librarians is not only within reach, but could become
commonplace within my lifetime. In twenty years, owning a digital copy of
every book in the world could be... kind of boring. [1]

(Of course, we will likely spend the rest of my life and more wrangling over
the legal right to copy the last 15% or so of these libraries from one set of
drives to another. But you can't have everything. ;)

\---

[1] Alhough at some point we'll have to come up with some really fast data
buses, or copying that petabyte of data is going to take some serious time.
Then there's the indexing and retrieval problems...

~~~
karanbhangui
This thought has made my day. Despite the petabytes of data going through the
web, something about the tangibility of books still has a huge place in my
mind.

------
gbhn
Here's a link to the Google Books blog post Crunchgear links to (with many
more details):

[http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-
stand-...](http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand-up-and-
be-counted.html)

------
electromagnetic
Now if I read a book a day I'll have read every (currently available) book in
the world in around 350,000 years. I guess I should start with the classics
first because otherwise I'd be dead before I finish the A's.

~~~
harpastum
_Not to argue with the sentiment, but to take it to its frivolous conclusion:_

According to Wikipedia[0], the letter A begins words approximately 11% of the
time. This only includes english, and is a distribution over all text, not
book titles. It is, however, a decent proxy[1]. After that, I also assume
regular English letter frequency for the rest of the letters [2].

Using these factors, there would be 14,175,136 books under the letter A. Aa
has 1,157,683 books. That's over 3,171 years just to get to Ab.

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency#Relative_frequ...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency#Relative_frequencies_of_the_first_letters_of_a_word_in_the_English_language)

[1] A much better proxy would be to find the relative frequencies of book
titles on Project Gutenberg.

[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency#Relative_frequ...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency#Relative_frequencies_of_letters_in_the_English_language)

------
technomancy
Better make that 128,864,881: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1578848>

