Digitized Media Statistics

Humans have “published” at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV Shows and short films and 100 billion public Web pages. This material is currently contained in all the libraries and archives of the world. When fully digitized, all the media could be compressed (at current technology rates) onto 50 petabyte (1,000,000,000,000,000 byte) hard disks.

Corporations and libraries are scanning about a million books per year. It costs $30 to scan a book at Stanford but only $10 in China.

Statistics from Kevin Kelly's New York Times article, Scan This Book!

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