Friday, December 09, 2005

"e" is for Everything

Certainly everyone has heard of "eBooks". If you have not, they are digitally published texts that you can read right on your computer screen. Well, up until recently, I had only ever thought that ebooks were digital copies of books that existed in print which you would find in a local book store or library...I was wrong.

A few weeks ago I discovered that many internet marketers create their own ebooks to offer to anyone interested in hearing about their success, secrets, strategys and tips. Well the digital text does not stop there.

While searching on eBay today for an inexpensive alternative for business forms, I came across some ebooks in my search results. One or two peaked my interest and before I knew it I was deep in the vault of ebook-dom. There was a book here, and another one there, and yet another one again. Every click seemed to turn up more and more ebooks on more and more topics.

I began to wonder if there was no limit to these available topics. Then I came across listings offering "bulk" ebooks, dozens or hundreds of different ebooks for mere dollars...and they even came with resell rights so that I could create my own listing, auction, or webpage to sell them too.

This got me curious, and I clicked some more, finding more and more "libraries"... 2,000 ebooks... 6,000 ebooks... 8,000 ebooks... WOW! I could not contain the interest anymore.
I had to purchase one of these libraries and see for myself. Why not? It was only an investment of a few dollars, and I would get the library nearly instantly.

So I made the purchase and I got the library. I opened it up and then... I got overwhelmed. Information overload, or certainly a potential case for it. While skimming some of the titles, and some of the other web sites linked to several titles, and skimming some more, I discovered that there are titles that exist on practically every topic imaginable.

Not only was there internet and auction marketing, but there was love & life, health & beauty, new age & occult, religious & spiritual, arts & crafts, etc., etc. Now I know that these available topics are not surprising, but keep in mind most of these type of ebooks are not "published" works. Essentially anyone can be digitally published. Anyone can write an ebook. Hopefully these writers have some sort of insight, experience, knowledge, education, or training, but the choices seem endless.

Some of the titles and topics that surprised me were "Become an Instant Chef", and "Dream Psychology by Freud", or Reincarnation Vedanta Philosophy", and "Helping Your Children Learn Geography". I know there never is a shortage of topics for books in a library, and certainly in a book store, but now it has reached to the digital world.

One of my personal long time favourite writers, Jeff Harrow of The Harrow Group, who writes "The Harrow Technology Report" for his website each month and for other publications such as Future Brief, sited a quotation from Spectrum Online entitled "Eternal Bits" which had this to say about the world's current state of digital data storage and creation:

"It took two centuries to fill the U.S. Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. with more than 29 million books and periodicals, 2.7 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4.8 million maps, and 57 million manuscripts. Today it takes about 15 minutes for the world to churn out an equivalent amount of new digital information. It does so about 100 times every day, for a grand total of five exabytes annually. That's an amount equal to all the words ever spoken by humans, according to Roy Williams, who heads the Center for Advanced Computing Research at the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena."

Jeff goes on to say "For example, in 2003 we generated enough data to fill a half-million Libraries of Congress -- that's five-million terabytes, or 5 exabytes. In just one year!"

WOW! Who has time to read any of that, even 1/10th of 1% of it. We are inundated with information everyday, and even more of it, exabytes more, and are available to us literally at our fingertips at any time we need or want it.

Once Google is able to move ahead with their print service, that amount of data will grow exponentially. The good thing is that books, documents and other texts in print which are old and at risk of deteriorating from existence (and which are limited in their availability and access) will be preserved and be much more accessible... by everyone.

The bad news... how long can this data be stored electronically before it deteriorates, or before the media we use today becomes obsolete and has to be transferred to a newer media in the future. It will be a huge task to maintain this data, and a huge industry surrounding it.

At the risk of perpetuating the very phenomenon I am discussing, I will end this blog post here, leaving you to your thoughts. Please feel free to add your comments at any time.

Thanks for reading, and please remember to visit my website at http://www.onsitetechnology.ca/ for great deals, articles, information and links, or my eBay consignment shop at http://www.udropcanada.com/.


Troy Roach
OnSite Technology
Stratford, Ontario
519-404-3357
519-40-GEEKS
http://www.onsitetechnology.ca/

889/1792

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