Every Book in your Pocket
Humans have been writing for a long, long time and in that time there have been millions of books published. There has always been a need for knowledge and books are the main storage of this knowledge but it has not been until recently that it has been possible to have all this knowledge in one place, nor has it been practical to sift through it to find what we are after. Technology, more specifically internet search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN, have made searching for relevant information easier and more accurate. If this was applied to books we could have all of human knowledge at our finger tips and find exactly what we are after in a few milliseconds, but first, every book needs to be digitized.
In December 2004 Google announced that it would digitally scan the books of five major research libraries to make their content searchable the idea of all human knowledge in one place suddenly became closer than ever. Brewster Kahle who is overseeing another scanning project says “It is really possible with the technology of today, not tomorrow. We can provide all the works of humankind to all the people of the world. It will be an achievement remembered for all time, like putting a man on the moon.”
When every book has been digitized all the data, when compressed, could fit on a 50 petabyte hard drive. 50 petabytes? When was the last time I mentioned that? If you look back to my article titled Running out of Space? you will notice that I calculated that an iPod would have 50 petabytes of storage space. Just imagine, all human knowledge sat in your pocket on your MP3 player in a few years time.