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Say an ebook is 2MB size; most are maybe half that.
5000 such books takes 10 GB, which is 1/6 of the 64 G SD card I added to my phone.
At 100 books a year, 5000 books is on the order of the number of books I'll read in the rest of my life, including re-reads. And that's with 1/6 the card and oversized files.
From another angle, say you can read 400 words a minute, and you read continuously for 100 years; that's 21 billion words in a century. Kind of a ridiculous upper bound, but let's run with it. At 100,000 words per book, that's 210,000 books, which at a more reasonable megabyte per file would take 210 GB. That's still overestimating file sizes -- I have a 200,000 word fanfic stores as a 1.2 MB ePub -- and reading time, by at least 3x -- so combing them puts us under 40 GB.
We're not at the point of having the Library of Congress in our pockets. We are at the point of having a lifetime's worth of reading in a pocket.
5000 such books takes 10 GB, which is 1/6 of the 64 G SD card I added to my phone.
At 100 books a year, 5000 books is on the order of the number of books I'll read in the rest of my life, including re-reads. And that's with 1/6 the card and oversized files.
From another angle, say you can read 400 words a minute, and you read continuously for 100 years; that's 21 billion words in a century. Kind of a ridiculous upper bound, but let's run with it. At 100,000 words per book, that's 210,000 books, which at a more reasonable megabyte per file would take 210 GB. That's still overestimating file sizes -- I have a 200,000 word fanfic stores as a 1.2 MB ePub -- and reading time, by at least 3x -- so combing them puts us under 40 GB.
We're not at the point of having the Library of Congress in our pockets. We are at the point of having a lifetime's worth of reading in a pocket.