[Web4lib] iPod Libraries; Was: Bitten by the Portable Apps bug!

[Eric Hellman]

It is worth a quick look at today's technology.

I have on my table here a copy of John Grisham's "the Brethren".

Each page has about 1500 symbols; there are 440 pages, for a total of 
660,000 symbols. Shannon's estimate for the entropy of the English 
language is 1.3 bits per symbol, so the full text of the Brethren 
will take up 107 kBytes of lossless storage.

So a top of the line 60GB iPod could store the full text of 559,440 
similar books, i.e  0.56 megaGrishams. If we allow some extra storage 
for cover art, we can round up and say that 100 GB= 1 megaGrisham.

So, sure, carrying around an entire library is not much of a stretch, 
it's just that carrying around an entire library in your iPod is not 
going to deliver nearly as much value as "Weapon of Choice" or 
"Smells Like Teen Spirit".
-- 

Eric Hellman, Director                            OCLC Openly 
Informatics Division
eric at openly.com                                    2 Broad St., Suite 208
tel 1-973-509-7800 fax 1-734-468-6216              Bloomfield, NJ 07003
http://www.openly.com/1cate/      1 Click Access To Everything