Reddit reviews Encyclopedia Britannica: With 2004 Book of the Year

Here's a picture of the last time someone tried printing a huge number of articles from the English language Wikipedia. It's basically impossible to print a single book of that size, so I'll assume it will be printed in many volumes like existing encyclopedias. According to this article, Wikipedia would currently fit into 2,762 volumes, each of which contains roughly 1.6 million words.

Weight is the easier part. Amazon says the Encyclopedia Britannica's 32 volumes weigh a total of 66.6 pounds. That words out to a per-volume weight of 2.08 pounds. Multiplying that by the total number of volumes gives 5,748 pounds (2,607 kg).

Now for reading time.

1.6 million words * 2,762 volumes = 4,419,200,000 total words

This study says that fast readers can read at around 330 words per minute. Assume you can maintain that pace for 12 hours every day (a big assumption). Doing the math gives us a total of around 51 years.

One day in the distant future, advanced technology will allow us to search out a specific term we're not sure about, like cladding, to figure out what it refers to.

For now, you're stuck using a dictionary, or an encyclopedia if the definition is too ambiguous for you. I'd highly recommend Encyclopedia Britannica if your copy of Webster's or the Oxford English Dictionary is insufficient, or if someone borrowed it and never returned it.

Well now, you can!

this was mine.

>Of your average 1 TB drive, how much is eaten up with system files, music, movies, caches, games, applications, overhead for DRM (think wrappers around text, a la PDF), etc.

Beside the point - we are talking entirely storage here, for which you can dedicate an entire 1TB (or whatever) hard drive.

To ignore the XML arguments, you can go by Wikipedia's word count, which it states is 50x the Encyclopaedia Britannica for English, or 160x for all languages. Words aren't the best comparison for data, but I think it's fair to say that the average word length will be almost identical for that much writing, so the amount of data stored scales roughly with number of words.

This 32-volume version of the EB is quoted at 32,640 pages. The going rate I can find on the internet for book printing is approximately 1p per page (e.g. Amazon's price), although I suspect you could reduce this if you were printing a lot of books.

At that rate, the EB would be £326.40, and English Wikipedia would be about £16,320. For comparison, I could buy two 3TB hard drives for the price of one EB, easily containing Wikipedia (including all that metadata) several hundred times over! You would have to get your printing costs ridiculously low (e.g. £15 for the entire 32-volume EB) to start getting below the costs of storing Wikipedia on USB sticks, let alone hard drives.

> can you recommend an encyclopedia? I can only find them focused on weapons or survivor skills or witchcraft and other really specific subjects.
Britannica was the last set I purchased. Mine is a few years old though you might be able to check them out from a local library because they are pricey.

http://www.amazon.com/Encyclopedia-Britannica-32-Book-Set/dp/0852299613