3 ms·

Google Books Determines That There Are 128,864,880 Books In The World (For Now)

22 points by McKittrick 16y ago

electromagnetic 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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_frequencies_of_the_first_letters_of_a_word_in_the_English_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency#Relative_frequ... [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_frequencies_of_letters_in_the_English_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency#Relative_frequ...
technomancy 16y ago
Better make that 128,864,881: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1578848 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1578848
mechanical_fish 16y ago
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 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 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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
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-up-and-be-counted.html http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand-...

22 points by McKittrick 16y ago

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 16y ago
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_frequencies_of_the_first_letters_of_a_word_in_the_English_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency#Relative_frequ... [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_frequencies_of_letters_in_the_English_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency#Relative_frequ...

technomancy 16y ago

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

mechanical_fish 16y ago

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 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 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 16y ago
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 16y ago

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