Maybe you would find the theory of information interesting: http://math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf http://math.harvard.edu/~

Maybe you would find the theory of information interesting: http://math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf http://math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entrop... Here in his famous tour de force Claude Shannon lays out the way we can estimate the amount of actual information in an act of communication (e.g. a literary work) and relates it to system entropy. To your point, !TB of all 1's compresses to a just few bits of actual information. But I suspect you are not actually speaking about the information contained in a literary work. You are probably thinking: how much expansive commentary and explanation could a literary work spawn? That is another question. The answer is always: unbounded.