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

[frank at limov.com]

Eric Hellman writes:
> 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.

That's fine if you consider text to be the dominant component of library 
content as far as storage goes.  However, text is insanely efficient 
compared with audio and video and pictures, which I suspect take up the 
majority of space on most people's pocket repositories. 

For example, I have a wallet with several USB sticks and memory cards, and 
way over 90% of the storage capacity (about 4GB in total) is given over to 
such material.  Every picture I take with my pocket camera is another 4MB or 
so, and about 15GB of my 60GB iPod is a recent cache of such images, since I 
often fill the 512MB card that's in the camera.  Additionally, about 6GB of 
space on my iPod is recently download podcasts, and they're just audio.  
None of this stuff is getting smaller, and all of us are carrying more of it 
every day. 

Is this relevant to libraries?  I think so, because the ones I frequent have 
CDs, videos and DVDs in their collections (as well as LPs and cassettes), 
and at least the British Library also accumulates every periodical published 
in Britain, many of which have CDs or DVDs on their covers every issue.  The 
British Library also actively archives web sites, although I don't know how 
one is meant to use that part of their collection. 

Consequently, it seems clear to me that a growing part of every library's 
collection will be non-textual material that exceeds text in storage 
requirements by several orders of magnitude.  I might be able to get the 
bare text of a million books in my pocket, but I certainly won't be able to 
get all their associated media. 

Even if we ignore all that new-fangled stuff, and just consider what's 
printed, there's still the problem of pictures to contend with.  The one 
book I've edited came out at just 187 A5 pages, but its PDF files take up 
25MB because of a handful of illustrations, while a related 22-page article 
takes nearly 30MB, again because of the illustrations.  These data points 
don't bode well for your back-of-the-ipod calculation. Nor is this a new 
problem -- back in 1978, I was using an anatomy textbook that was basically 
a couple of hundred 11"x17" life-sized colour photographs of dissections.  
Even today, that one book would be banging its head on a 1GB limit. 

> So, sure, carrying around an entire library is not much of a stretch, 

Unless the definition of 'entire library' specifically excludes all the 
eye-wateringly bulbous data that isn't text, I don't see how even a crate of 
iPods could accommodate it, today or tomorrow.
-- 
Frank Wales [frank at limov.com]