About the Project

Senior Researchers: Peter Lyman and Hal R. Varian

Research Assistants: James Dunn, Aleksey Strygin, Kirsten Swearingen

This study is an attempt to measure how much information is produced in the world each year. We
look at several media and estimate yearly production, accumulated stock, rates of growth, and other
variables of interest.
If you want to understand what we've done, we offer different recommendations, depending on the
degree to which you suffer from information overload:

Heavy information overload: the world's total yearly production of print, film, optical, and magnetic
content would require roughly 1.5 billion gigabytes of storage. This is the equivalent of 250
megabytes per person for each man, woman, and child on earth.

Moderate information overload: read the Sound Bytes and look at the Charts illustrating our
findings.

Normal information overload: read the Executive Summary.

Information deprived: read the detailed reports by clicking on the contents to your left. Or
download the entire Web site as a PDF file. (It is about 100 pages long.)

This study was produced by faculty and students at the School of Information Management and
Systems at the University of California at Berkeley. We gratefully acknowledge financial support
from EMC. We have put "[???]" in the text where we had to make "questionable" assumptions. If
you have suggestions, corrections, or comments, please send email to
[email protected]. We view this as a "living document" and intend to update it
based on such contributions.

© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Executive Summary

Abstract

The world produces between 1 and 2 exabytes of unique information per year, which is roughly 250
megabytes for every man, woman, and child on earth. An exabyte is a billion gigabytes, or 1018
bytes. Printed documents of all kinds comprise only .003% of the total. Magnetic storage is by far the
largest medium for storing information and is the most rapidly growing, with shipped hard drive
capacity doubling every year. Magnetic storage is rapidly becoming the universal medium for
information storage.

■ Introduction
■ Information Produced by Medium
■ Qualifications
● Duplication
● Compression
● Archival Media
● World and US Production
● Growth Rates
● TV and Radio
■ Non-Digital Communication
■ Consumption of Information
■ Individual and Published Information
■ Conclusion
■ About this Report
■ Appendices
■ Bibliography

Introduction

The cost of magnetic storage is dropping rapidly; as of Fall 2000 a gigabyte of storage costs less
than $10 and it is predicted that this cost will drop to $1 by 2005. Soon it will be technologically
possible for an average person to access virtually all recorded information. The natural question then
becomes: how much information is there to store? If we wanted to store "everything," how much
storage would it take?

We have conducted a study to answer this question. In particular, we have estimated yearly US and
world production of originals and copies for the most common forms of information media. We have
also attempted to estimate the cumulated stock of information in various formats. Finally, we have
described the magnitudes of some communication flows that are currently not stored but may well be

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Executive Summary
in the future.

Information produced by medium

Most information is stored in four physical media: paper, film, optical (CDs and DVDs), and magnetic.
There are very good data for the worldwide production of each storage medium, and there are
reasonably good estimates of how much original content is produced in each of these different
formats.

We have identified production of content by media type, translated the volume of original content into
a common standard (terabytes), determined how much storage each type takes under certain
assumptions about compression, attempted to adjust for duplication of content, and added up to get
total estimates.

Table 1 depicts yearly worldwide production of original stored content as of 1999. In general, the
upper estimate is based on the raw data, while the lower estimate reflects an attempt to adjust for
duplication and compression. We discuss these adjustments below and in the medium-specific
documents. Note that the growth rate estimates are very rough. See the "Qualifications" section and
Appendix A for further discussion; the details of the calculations are presented in the accompanying
documents.
Table 1: Worldwide production of original content, stored digitally using standard
compression methods, in terabytes circa 1999.
Storage Medium Type of Content Terabytes/Year, Terabytes/Year, Growth
Upper Estimate Lower Estimate Rate, %
Books 8 1 2
Newspapers 25 2 -2
Paper Periodicals 12 1 2
Office documents 195 19 2
Subtotal: 240 23 2
Photographs 410,000 41,000 5
Cinema 16 16 3
Film
X-Rays 17,200 17,200 2
Subtotal: 427,216 58,216 4
Music CDs 58 6 3
Data CDs 3 3 2
Optical
DVDs 22 22 100
Subtotal: 83 31 70
Camcorder Tape 300,000 300,000 5
PC Disk Drives 766,000 7,660 100
Magnetic Departmental Servers 460,000 161,000 100
Enterprise Servers 167,000 108,550 100
Subtotal: 1,693,000 577,210 55
TOTAL: 2,120,539 635,480 50

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Executive Summary
Three striking facts emerge from these estimates. The first is the "paucity of print." Printed material
of all kinds makes up less than .003 percent of the total storage of information. This doesn't imply
that print is insignificant. Quite the contrary: it simply means that the written word is an extremely
efficient way to convey information.
The second striking fact is the ``democratization of data.'' A vast amount of unique information is
created and stored by individuals. Original documents created by office workers are more than 80%
of all original paper documents, while photographs and X-rays together are 99% of all original film
documents. Camcorder tapes are also a significant fraction of total magnetic tape storage of unique
content, with digital tapes being used primarily for backup copies of material on magnetic drives.

As for hard drives, roughly 55% of the total are installed in single-user desktop computers. Of
course, much of the content on individual user's hard drives is not unique, which accounts for the
large difference between the upper and lower bounds for magnetic storage. However, as more and
more image data moves onto hard drives, we expect to see the amount of digital content produced
by individuals stored on hard drives increase dramatically.

This democratization of data is quite remarkable. A century ago the average person could only
create and access a small amount of information. Now, ordinary people not only have access to
huge amounts of data, but are also able to create gigabytes of data themselves and, potentially,
publish it to the world via the Internet, if they choose to do so.

The third interesting finding is the "dominance of digital" content. Not only is digital information
production the largest in total, it is also the most rapidly growing. While unique content on print and
film are hardly growing at all, optical and digital magnetic storage shipments are doubling each year.
Even today, most textual information is "born digital,'' and within a few years this will be true for
images as well. Digital information is inexpensive to copy and distribute, is searchable, and is
malleable. Thus the trend towards democratization of data---especially in digital form---is likely to
continue.

Qualifications

It goes without saying that the numbers in Table 1 can only be taken as rough estimates. We have
had to make various assumptions in order to construct our these figures, and some data sources are
contradictory or simply not available. Here we list some of the most serious methodological
qualifications, each of which offers interesting challenges for those who would seek to refine these
estimates.

Duplication.

It is very difficult to distinguish "copies" from "original" information. A newspaper, for example,
is published on paper, often published on the Web as well, and is generally archived on
microfilm. In fact, most printed materials are produced and/or archived magnetically. There is
also lot of duplication within each medium: many newspapers reproduce stock prices, wire
stories, advertisements and so on. Ideally, we would like to measure the storage required for
the unique content in the newspaper, but it is very hard to measure that number. As indicated
above, the duplication issue is particularly serious for digital storage, since little of what is
stored on individual hard drives is unique. We've tried to adjust for this the best we can, and
documented our assumptions in the detailed treatment of each medium.

Compression.

Unlike print or film, there is no unambiguous way to measure the size of digital information. A
600 dot per inch scanned digital image of text can be compressed to about one hundredth of
its original size. A DVD version of a movie can be 1000 times smaller than the original digital
image. We've made what we thought were sensible choices with respect to compression,
steering a middle course between the high estimate (based on ``reasonable'' compression)
and the low estimate (based on highly compressed content). It is worth noting that the fact
that digital storage can be compressed to different degrees depending on needs is a

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Executive Summary
significant advantage for digital over analog storage.

Archival Media.

Should information stored as "backup" be included in the total? This question arises for
microfilm, rewritable CD ROMS, and even with print, but digital magnetic tape is the most
difficult case. Tape's most common use is to archive material on hard drives and therefore
should not count towards the stock of ``original information'' produced each year. Industry
rules of thumb suggest that there is about 10 times as much storage on tape as on hard
drives. This fraction has been falling as more and more data is stored on arrays of hard
drives, which are much more convenient to use. We've omitted most tape storage for this
reason. However, we should also note that vast quantities of original scientific data are stored
in tape libraries; we describe a few such repositories in the detailed treatment of magnetic
storage.

World and US production.

The US produces about 25% of all textual information and about 30% of the photographic
information, a significant fraction of the world's total. We don't have good data on magnetic
storage, but it seems plausible that the US produces at least half of the content stored on
magnetic media. We've used numbers for world production when available, but in some cases
have had to extrapolate from US production. Little data is available about information
production in the Third World.

Growth rates.

The production of unique content in books, photos, and CDs is barely growing. DVD content is
growing rapidly, but that's because it is a new medium and a significant amount of legacy
content is being converted. By contrast, shipments of digital magnetic storage are essentially
doubling every year.

TV and Radio.

Original TV content produced each year is generally stored on magnetic camcorder tapes,
and so is counted in that category of storage media. Much radio content is simply broadcast
music, which we have already captured with the CD statistics. See Table 3 for information on
how much storage it would take to back up all TV and radio broadcasts, with minimal
adjustment for duplication.

Digital Communication

Our project is primarily concerned with content that is stored, either by institutions or by individuals.
But there is a lot of material that is communicated, without being systematically stored. Some of this
material is born digital, such as email, Usenet, and the Web. Some of it is non-digital, such as
telephone calls and letters.

We expect that digital communications will be systematically archived in the near future, and thus will
contribute to the demand for storage. Table 2 shows how much storage would be required to archive
the major forms of digital communication.

Table 2: Summary of yearly unique computer-mediated information flows.

Content Terabytes
Email 11,285
Usenet 73

In 2000 the World Wide Web consisted of about 21 terabytes of static HTML pages, and is growing
at a rate of 100% per year. Many Web pages are generated on-the-fly from data in databases, so the

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Executive Summary

total size of the "deep Web" is considerably larger.

Although the social impact of the Web has been phenomenal, about 500 times as much email is
being produced per year as the stock of Web pages. It appears that about 610 billion emails are sent
per year, compared to 2.1 billion static Web pages. Even the yearly flow of Usenet news is more
than 3 times the stock of Web pages. As Odlyzko (2000) puts it, "communication, not content, is the
killer app."

Non-digital Communication

We also estimated the storage requirements if one attempted to archive all the non-digital
communication flows in the United States. We consider only the US since we didn't have very good
data for worldwide communication. The results are shown in Table 3.

Table 3: Summary of yearly non-digital communication flows in the United

States 1999.
Content Terabytes
Radio 788
TV 14,150
Telephone 576,000
Postal 150,000

The striking thing here is the volume of voice telephone traffic, most of which is presumably unique
content. Radio and TV, by contrast, have a huge amount of duplication from station to station, since
many of the broadcasts are reusing the same content.

Consumption of Information

Though the main focus of our report is on the supply of information, it is interesting to look at data
measuring the consumption of information as well. Table 4 depicts hours per year of time spent on
various media in US households in 1992 and in 2000. We do not have good data on information use
in the workplace.

Table 4: Summary of yearly media use by US households in hours per year,

with estimated megabyte equivalent. (Hours from Statistical Abstract of the
United States, 1999, Table 920, (projected)).
Item 1992 Hours 2000 Hours 2000 % Change
MBytes
TV 1510 1571 3,142,000 4
Radio 1150 1056 57,800 -8
Recorded Music 233 269 13,450 15
Newspaper 172 154 11 -10
Books 100 96 7 -4
Magazines 85 80 6 -6
Home video 42 55 110,000 30
Video games 19 43 21,500 126

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Executive Summary

Internet 2 43 9 2,050
Total: 3,324 3,380 3,344,783 1.7

The notable features of this table are 1) the hours spent on TV and radio consumption and their
consistency over time; 2) the reduction in time spent on printed information; and, 3) the dramatic
increase in home video, video games, and Internet usage. However, it is important to note that the
latter three categories are still very small in terms of total hours.

It is also noteworthy that total time spent in media access has hardly changed in eight years. Even
while information supply is growing dramatically (especially in electronic media) the actual
consumption of information is barely changing: a smaller and smaller fraction of what is produced is
actually consumed, on average, a trend noted by Pool (1984). Census data indicate that over 40% of
the US population has access to the Internet, so this trend is likely to increase.

Individual and Published Information

We remarked above that technological advances have allowed for a "democratization of data:"
individuals can now generate a huge amount of information on their own. Table 5 summarizes the
yearly production of information by and about individuals.

Table 5: Yearly production of individual information

Item Amount Terabytes
Photographs 80 billion images 410,000
Home videos 1.4 billion tapes 300,000
X-rays 2 billion images 17,200
Hard disks 200 million installed drives 13,760
Total: 740,960

The production of individual information can be compared to the amount of "published" information in
Table 6. Note that the amount of "individual" information is over 600 times larger as the amount of
published information.

Although the Web, Usenet, and email include a great deal of individual information, they have been
omitted from both of these tables, since it is difficult to know whether to classify this material as
"individual" or "public." In the future we expect the distinction between "individual" and "public" to
become increasingly blurred.

Table 6: Yearly production of published information

Item Titles Terabytes
Books 968,735 8
Newspapers 22,643 25
Journals 40,000 2
Magazines 80,000 10
Newsletters 40,000 .2
Office Documents 7,500,000,000 195
Cinema 4,000 16

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Executive Summary

Music CDs 90,000 6

Data CDs 1,000 3
DVD-video 5,000 22
Total: 285

Conclusion

The world's total production of information amounts to about 250 megabytes for each man, woman,
and child on earth. It is clear that we are all drowning in a sea of information. The challenge is to
learn to swim in that sea, rather than drown in it. Better understanding and better tools are
desperately needed if we are to take full advantage of the ever-increasing supply of information
described in this report.

About this Report

Financial support for this study was provided by EMC. We view this report as a "living document"
and intend to revise it based on comments, corrections, and suggestions. Please send such
materials to [email protected].

About the School of Information Management and Systems

UC Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems is the first school in the nation to
explicitly address the growing need to manage information more effectively.

With respect to education, we are training a new type of professional: "information managers". Our
graduates are familiar with the latest and most powerful techniques for locating, organizing,
retrieving, manipulating, protecting, and presenting information. They study not only technology, but
also the institutional, legal, economic and organizational factors necessary for creating information
systems that meet peoples' needs.
With respect to research, we are examining ways to build more effective tools and systems for
managing information. This effort is inherently multidisciplinary, involving computer science,
information science, social science, cognitive science, and legal studies.

Appendices
■ A. Powers of Ten
The Powers of Ten table is helpful in illustrating the relative size of gigabytes, terabytes,
petabytes and the like.

■ B. Upper and lower estimates

The upper estimate is a reasonably "hard" number; based on published data. The lower
estimate is an attempt to adjust for duplication and compression. Here is a quick summary of
some of those adjustments.

❍ Paper.
There is some duplication with ISBN numbers due to paperback, hardback, different
editions, etc. There is duplication with financial papers, ads, and so on in newspapers.
We used CPC compression, which captures images; conversion to ASCII eliminates
images, but compresses text dramatically.

❍ Film.
If we used JPEG compression, rather than PhotoCD, we get a much smaller number

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Executive Summary
for the storage requirements for images.

❍ Music CDs.
If we use MP3 compression we get a much smaller number for the storage
requirements of audio files.

❍ Magnetic.
We assume that about 20 percent of magnetic storage is unique.

■ C. Reading the data

The left-side navigation and Site Map provide links to summary reports on each medium. The
summaries provide links to detailed reports and spreadsheets containing the raw data.

Within each media type, we have distinguished between originals and copies, and between
the yearly flow of production and the accumulated stock. We've also described growth rates
and compression issues for each medium.

■ D. Acknowledgements
Gray and Shenoy (2000) provides useful information on trends in magnetic storage. Lesk
(1997) conducted an earlier study that attempted to estimate the total stock of information.
Pool (1984) examined the flow of information in the US circa 1980. See the individual
acknowledgements for the names of people who helped us.

Bibliography
■ Jim Gray and Prashant Shenoy.
Rules of thumb in data engineering.
in Proceedings of 16th International Conference on Data Engineering, pages 3-12. IEEE,
2000.
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■ Michael Lesk.
How much information is there in the world?
Technical report, lesk.com, 1997.
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■ Andrew Odlyzko.
Content is not king.
Technical report, AT&T Labs, 2000.
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■ Ithiel De Sola Pool, Hiroshi Inose, Nozomu Takasaki, Roger Hurwitz.

Communications flows : a census in the United States and Japan.
Elsevier Science, New York, 1984.

■ Ithiel De Sola Pool. "Tracking the Flow of Information".

Science (12 August), 1983, 221:4611, 609-613.

■ U.S. Census Bureau.

Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1999
Washington, D.C., 1999.
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© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Executive Summary

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Print

■ Originals
● Flow
❍ World
❍ United States
❍ Notes on Conversion Assumptions
● Stock
❍ World
❍ United States
● Rate of Change
■ Copies
● Flow
❍ World
❍ United States
● Stock
● Rate of Change
■ References
■ Charts
■ More Discussion

Originals

Flow

Approximately 240 terabytes (compressed) of unique data are recorded on printed media
worldwide each year, as shown in the following table:

Table 1: World Flow

Media Type Unique Items Conversion Factor Total
(Sources and Year per Year Terabytes
Cited)* (Annual
Worldwide)

Scanned image (600 dpi): 40 39

MB/book
Books
968,735
(UNESCO 1996) Digital compression: 8 MB/book 8
Plain text: 1 MB/book 1

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Print

Scanned image (600 dpi): 5,475 124

MB/year
Newspapers
22,643
(ISSN 1999) Digital compression: 1095 MB/year 25
Plain text: 110 MB/year 2.5
Scanned image (600 dpi): 225 9
Scholarly MB/year
journals 40,000
(Ulrich's 2000) Digital compression: 45 MB/year 2
Plain text: 4 MB/year .2
Scanned image (600 dpi): 650 52
Mass-market MB/year
periodicals 80,000
(Ulrich's 2000) Digital compression: 130 MB/year 10
Plain text: 13 MB 1
Scanned image (600 dpi): 20 .8
Newsletters MB/item
(Oxbridge 40,000
Directory 1997) Digital compression: 4 MB/item .2
Plain text: .4 MB/item .02
Archivable, Scanned image (600 dpi): 130 975
original office KB/page
documents 7.5 X 109 pages
(National Digital compression: 26 KB/page 195
Archives 1998) Plain text: 2.5 KB/page 19
Scanned:
1200 TB
Totals: Compressed:
240 TB
Text: 24 TB
* Detailed source information listed at end of this document.

Table 2: United States Flow

Media Type Unique Items Conversion Factor Total
(Sources and Year per Year Terabytes
Cited)* (Annual
Worldwide)

Scanned image (600 dpi): 40 3

Books (US MB/book
Statistical 64,711
Abstract 1999) Digital compression: 8 MB/book .5
Plain text: 1 MB/book .05
Scanned image (600 dpi): 5,475 13
Newspapers
MB/year
(Newspaper
2,386
Association of Digital compression: 1095 MB/year 3
America)
Plain text: 110 MB/year .3
Scanned image (600 dpi): 225 2
Scholarly
MB/year
journals
10,500

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Print
(Tenopir and Digital compression: 45 MB/year .5
King)
Plain text: 4 MB/year .04
Scanned image (600 dpi): 650 13
Mass-market MB/year
periodicals 20,000
(Ulrich's 2000) Digital compression: 130 MB/year 2.6
Plain text: 13 MB .26
Scanned image (600 dpi): 20 .2
MB/item
Newsletters
10,000
(NEPA) Digital compression: 4 MB/item .04
Plain text: .4 MB/item .004
Archivable, Scanned image (600 dpi): 130 390
original office KB/page
documents 3 X 109 pages
(National Digital compression: 26 KB/page 78
Archives 1998) Plain text: 2.5 KB/page 7.5
Scanned:
421 TB
Totals: Compressed:
84 TB
Text: 8.2 TB
* Detailed source information listed at end of this document.

Notes on Conversion Assumptions

Books. Estimate 300 pages per book. (Source: Robert M. Hayes, UCLA, "The Economics of Digital
Libraries" www.usp.br/sibi/economics.html)

Newspapers. Estimate 30 pages per newspaper, then multiply by 365 days per year. (The page
number is low, to reflect the number of small and non-daily newspapers published around the
world.)

Scholarly Journals. Estimate 1,700 pages per periodical per year. (Source: Donald W. KLing and
Carol Tenopir. "Economic Cost Models of Scientific Scholarly Journals," 1998.
www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/icsu/kingppr.htm)

Mass Market Periodicals. Estimate 5,000 pages per periodical per year. (Source: Robert M.
Hayes, UCLA, "The Economics of Digital Libraries" www.usp.br/sibi/economics.html)

Newsletters. Estimate 150 pages per newsletter per year. (Source: Oxbridge Directory of
Newsletters - 1997)

Office documents. The estimate above is limited to documents that an organization might retain
permanently such as documents comparable to those retained by the National Archives in
Washington D.C., which estimates that they retain 2% of US government documents produced each
year.

More detail on the conversion factors used for the above estimates appears in the Print Detail
Report.

Stock

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Print

United States

According to a press release from January 2000, booksinprint.com 2000 includes 3.2 million titles -
about 26 TB total. This figure is supported by online booksellers such as Amazon.com and
Barnes&Noble.com who claim to offer access to 3 to 4 million titles.

If one wished to more fully address the universe of book titles in the United States, including those
that are no longer in print, one could look to the holdings of the larger national libraries and
copyright repositories - for example, the Library of Congress print media collection includes almost
26 million books (208 terabytes).

World

To estimate the international stock of books currently available for purchase, we extrapolate from
the United States production figures. The US engages in the world's largest trade in printed
products, producing about 40% of the world's printed material, according to the US Industry and
Trade Outlook 2000. The world stock of original titles might be about 8 million titles - equivalent to
64 TB.

Using the same 40% rule of thumb, we can also estimate the worldwide stock of books (including
those out of print). The national library and copyright repository of the United States - the Library of
Congress - contains about 26 million books. Therefore, the world stock of books might be
approximately 65 million titles.

Rate of change

The number of titles within most print media forms have increased each year worldwide - between 2
and 10%. Within the US, the number of book titles increased every year until 1996, when there was
a 5% downturn.

Copies

Flow

If all of the writing paper and newsprint produced each year were used to store printed information,
this would be equivalent to about 980,000 terabytes worldwide.

World

As of 1997, the world was producing 90 million metric tons of printing and writing paper and 36
million metric tons of newspaper. In equivalent bytes, this translates to 540,000 TB (world) for
printing and writing paper, and 432,000 TB for newsprint.

The number of books sold worldwide may be estimated using the 40% rule of thumb (cited above)
and the US book sales statistics (cited below): about 2.75 billion books, equivalent to 22,000 TB.

United States

The US produces about 30% of the world's paper and paperboard output (Source: US Industry &
Trade Outlook 2000). In 1999, the US produced 23.8 million metric tons of printing and writing paper
and 6.4 million metric tons of newsprint. In bytes, this translates to 142,800 TB for printing and
writing paper and 76,800 TB for newsprint. These figures provide an upper bound on the total
number of bytes required to digitally store all the information produced in printed format each year.

About 1.1 billion books were sold in the United States in 1999. Using the 8 MB/book estimate, this
is equivalent to 8,800 TB. (Source: Wall Street Journal, July 17, 2000, "A New Chapter:
Independent Booksellers Hope to Find Strength in Numbers" by Scott Eden.)

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Print
In the United States 55,979,332 daily newspapers and 59,894,381 Sunday newspapers circulate
each year. (Source: Newspaper Association of America, citing Editor and Publisher.)

The total number of US magazines circulated annually exceeds 500 million. (Source: US Industry
and Trade Outlook.)

Each year, almost 500 billion copies are produced on copiers in the US; nearly 15 trillion copies
are produced on copiers, printers, and multi-function machines. (Source: XeroxParc). For specific
information on fax printing, see the Telecommunications Summary.

Stock

According to the 1999 US Industry and Trade Outlook, the United States produces more printed
products than any other country in the world. NAFTA countries have a 50% world market share.
Estimating that the US produces 40% of the world's printed materials, we can estimate that each
year the world produces 7.5 billion archiveable pages, which would be equivalent to 195
terabytes (compressed). (Source: National Archives and Records Administration.)
Rate of Change

As with the other print industries, growth in paper production is expected to be incremental but fairly
consistent, both within the United States and internationally. Globally, paper and paperboard
production capacity is forecast to grow from 333.6 million metric tons in 1998 to 348.1 million metric
tons in 2001, an increase of 14.5 million metric tons (about 4%) over those three years. (Source:
U.S. Industry and Trade Outlook, 2000).

According to the American Forest and Paper Association, US capacity to produce paper will
increase by an average of only 0.7% annually over the next three years (2000-2002).

References

■ Bogart, Dave, ed. The Bowker Annual Library and Book Trade Almanac, 44th edition. New
Jersey: R.R. Bowker, 1999.
■ Cummings, Anthony M., Marcia L. Witte, William G. Bowen, and Laura O. Lazarus. University
Libraries and Scholarly Communication: A Study Prepared for the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation. The Association of Research Libraries, 1992
■ Hayes, Robert M., UCLA School of Information Science, "The Economics of Digital Libraries"
■ King, Donald W. and Carol Tenopir. "Economic Cost Models of Scientific Scholarly Journals,"
1998.
■ American Forest and Paper Association, 1999 Statistics for Paper, Paperboard and Wood
Pulp. Washington, DC, 1999. To order a copy, see www.afandpa.org/about/about.html or call
(800) 244-3090.
■ Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1999.
■ ArchiveBuilders.com White Paper, "Computer Storage Requirements for Various Digitized
Document Types"
■ Association of Research Libraries Statistics
■ Books in Print, 1999-2000. New Jersey: R.R. Bowker, 1999.
■ International Standard Serial Number Register
■ International Standard Book Number Register
■ JSTOR digital library
■ Magazine Publishers of America, Information Center, (212) 872-3745.
■ National Directory of Magazines.

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Print
■ Newsletter and Electronic Publisher's Association (NEPA)
■ Newspaper Association of America, Facts About Newspapers.
■ Newspaper Project, National Endowment for the Humanities.
■ Oxbridge Directory of Newsletters 1997. New York: Oxbridge Communications, Inc., 1997.
■ Ulrich's International Periodical Directory. New York: Bowker Publishing, 2000.
■ UNESCO Statistical Yearbook 1999. Paris, UNESCO, 1999.
■ U.S. Census Department, 1999 Statistical Abstract of the United States
■ U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics
■ U.S. Government Printing Office, Prepared Statement before the Committee on Rules and
Administration, U.S. Senate on Public Access to Government Information in the 21st Century
July 1996.
■ U.S. Industry and Trade Outlook. Available in print from McGraw Hill/U.S Department of
Commerce Washington, D.C. or download from www.ntis.gov/products
■ Chaskas, Eric. US National Archives and Records Administration.
■ Walden's Paper Report. Twice-monthly newsletter, published by Walden-Mott Corporation,
Ramsey, NJ. Available by subscription only. See
www.walden-mott.com/PaperReport/PAP_RPT.HTM or call (201) 818-8630.

Charts

Click here to see charts supporting the above estimates, with time-series data.

More Discussion

Click here to read additional discussion of the conversion factors and related issues and to obtain
detailed bibliographical information.

© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Film

■ Originals
● Flow
❍ Photographs
❍ Motion Pictures
❍ X-Rays
● Stock
❍ Photographs
❍ Motion Pictures
❍ X-Rays
■ Copies
● Flow
❍ Photographs
❍ Motion Pictures
❍ X-Rays
● Stock
❍ Photographs
❍ Motion Pictures
❍ X-Rays
■ References
■ More Details

Originals

Flow

Photographs

There are over 2700 photographs taken every second around the world, adding up to well over 80
billion new images a year taken on over 3 billion rolls of film, according to estimates published by
the United States Department of Commerce.

Photo CD, a format for digitized photography introduced by Kodak in 1992, has been widely
adopted both by professional and amateur photographers. Kodak reports that the typical photograph
can be digitized in this format in 5 megabytes without loss of picture quality. Utilizing this conversion
factor, then, the world's 82 billion photos store 410 petabytes of data every year in photographs.

Motion Pictures

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Film
Apart from still photography, film is also used to store moving pictures. In the years from 1990 to
1995, UNESCO reports that there were 4,250 films produced annually throughout the world. The
Motion Picture Association of America reports that for the year 1998, its members released 221
movies (compared to 219 in 1997), while releases by all U.S. companies, including independent film
companies, rose from 461 in 1997 to 490 in 1998.

It takes approximately 2 gigabytes to store an hour of motion picture images in digital form using the
MPEG-2 compression standard. If the images in 4500 full length movies were converted into bits,
the world's annual original cinematic production would, therefore, consume about 16 terabytes.

X-Ray Film

The other major use for film is the storage of x-ray images for medical, dental and industrial
purposes. Approximately 2 billion radiographs are taken around the world each year, including chest
x-rays, mammograms, CT scans, and so on. (Traditionally, 8% of x-ray film is used in dentistry and
industrial applications.) When x-ray films are converted to digital format, it is important that there is
no important clinical information lost. The University of Pittsburgh Clinical Multimedia Laboratory
suggests that an average conversion of a chest x-ray to digital storage with lossless compression
will require 8 megabytes. To store all the world's x-rays to a computer file of this size would,
therefore, require 17 petabytes each year.

Table 1: Original Data On Film Annually Worldwide

Units Digital Conversion Total
Petabytes
Photography 82,000,000,000 5 mb per photo 410
Motion Pictures 4,000 4 gb per movie 0.016
X-Rays 2,160,000,000 8 mb per radiograph 17.2
All Film Total: 427.216

Stock

Photographs

The number of original photographs stored around the world is not a widely reported topic. There
are commercial firms that collect professional photographs for resale and the largest of these report
collections in the tens of millions. For example, Getty Images reports holding 70 million images
mostly on silver halide film and its principal rival, Corbis Images, claims 65 million images.

As for amateur photographs, in 1997 it was estimated that there were 150 billion photographs stored
in the United States. This is approximately 8 to 10 years production of photographs as of that time.
Assuming that similar storage rates apply worldwide, it is likely that on the order of 750 billion
photographs now exist. Using the same PhotoCD estimate of 5 megabytes per photo, there are 3.5
exabytes of original photographic data.

Motion Pictures

The number of motion pictures made around the world from 1895 to 1990 was approximately
242,000. The International Film Index, 1895-1990, lists entries of that many titles of films. (There is
no guarantee that some of these movies still exist, however.) The overall total is broken down into
these categories of film types:

Table 2: Film Breakdown by Type

Type Number

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Film

FEATURE 110,586
SHORT 50,056
ANIMATED 9,787
DOCUMENTARY 7,277
TELEVISION 4,197
SERIAL 553
SILENT 59,680
TOTAL 242,136

The "Television" category refers to films that were originally made for television broadcast rather
than theatrical release. "Serials" are films made primarily in the United States between 1914-1936
and were made to be shown in weekly installments.

As discussed in the precedng section, in the decade since 1990, there have been around 4500
movies made each year, adding another 45,000 to the total world stock of original motion pictures.
Accordingly, a good estimate of the world's original pictures is approximately 300,000.

X-Rays

The clinical and legal uses of medical x-rays continue for an indefinite time and, therefore, prudent
practice is to preserve x-rays and medical records generally for as long as possible. The same
principle applies to dental x-rays. The only use of x-ray that may result in regular destruction of the
resulting images is industrial testing, but even there it is likely that images are retained for a
substantial period of time. Therefore, it is believed that there is little systematic destruction of the
flow of new x-rays and virtually all of them are added to the stock. For the sake of calculation, it is
assumed that a full ten years of x-ray images will constitute the stock. This is equivalent to
approximately 21.6 billion images or 172.8 petabytes.

Copies

Flow

Photographs

There has been very little history of the large mass of photographs being copied. Kodak estimates
that only about 2 percent of photographs are ever copied or modified in any way after they are
originally developed. Of course, some photographic images are widely distributed in newspapers
and magazines. But these represent a miniscule fraction even of the professional photographer's
work, itself a small minority of all photographs.

One copy of 2 percent of the annual new photographs would be 1.6 billion photographic copies.
With PhotoCD compression, this would represent 8 petabytes per year of photographic copies.

Motion Pictures

The Wolfman Report on the Photographic and Imaging Industry in the United States states that the
average number of prints per original motion picture is 700. The Silver Institute, however, reports
that 6000 release prints are made for each feature movie. A figure of 1000 copies for motion
pictures will be used on the assumption that many of the world's motion pictures have more limited
releases than the typical Hollywood blockbuster. American studios only account for 400 to 500
movies per year. 45,000 copies of motion pictures per year at 4 gigabytes per copy is 18 petabytes
of copies.

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Film

X-Rays

The clinical requirements for medical x-rays demand that originals be used in almost any situation.
There is no siginificant use of copies of x-rays at all.

Stock

Photographs

The stock of copies of photographs can be calculated by reference to the assumptions made for the
storage of the originals. Ten years of copies of photographs would be 16 billion. If these were all
digitized at the rate of 5 megabytes per picture, there are 80 petabytes of photographic copies on
hand.

Motion Picture

The copies on film of motion pictures made for distribution are short-lived. Most of these copies are
deliberately destroyed when the general theatrical release of the movie is over. If even ten of these
survive for the approximately 4,000 motion pictures made annually for the last twenty-five years, this
would be equivalent to about 1,000,000 copies. If each copy is equivalent to 4 gigabytes of data,
this stock of copies of motion picture film is 4 petabytes.

X-Rays

There is no significant stock of copies of x-rays.

References

■ United States Industrial and Trade Outlook 2000

■UNESCO Statistical Yearbook
■ 1999 Photo Marketing Association

■ Silver Institute

More Details About Film

© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Optical

■ Originals
● Flow
❍ World
❍ United States
● Stock
● Rate of Change
■ Copies
● Flow
● Stock
■ Optical Media Bibliography
■ Charts
■ More Discussion

Originals

For optical media, we focused on the three major industry categories: CD audio, CD-ROM, and
DVD.

Flow

Annual world title production of the 3 media types appears in the following chart. (All figures are
rounded to the nearest hundred or terabyte.)

Table 1: Annual world title production of the 3 media types.

Media Unique Unique Conversion Factor Total Total
Type Items per Items per Terabytes Terabytes
(Source* & Year (US) Year (Annual US) (Annual
Year Cited) Worldwide)
(World)
Uncompressed: .650
22 58
CD - Music GB/item
33,100 90,000
(1998) Compressed (to
2 6
MP3): .065 GB/item
Uncompressed (to
1 3
CD- ROM MP3): .650 GB/item
500 1,000
(1999) Compressed: .065
.3 .6
GB/item
DVD-video
3,000 5,000 4.38 GB/item 13 22
(1999)

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Optical

Uncompressed 36 83
Totals:
Compressed 15.3 29
*Detailed source information listed at end of this document.

World

To estimate how many CD-audio originals are created each year worldwide, we used RIAA statistics
regarding the US market share and US record releases (see below). The United States holds a 37%
share of the world music market and releases about 33,100 items per year. Therefore, the world
produces roughly 90,000 originals per year, equivalent to 58 TB (uncompressed).

Between 1998 and 1999, 1,000 new CD-ROM data titles were added to CD-ROMs in Print, an
international directory published by Gale Research. This equals about 3 TB of new information in
one year (uncompressed).

The United States currently produces about 60% of the DVD titles available worldwide. Using US
title production statistics, we estimate that about 5,000 new DVD titles are produced internationally
each year - this is about 22 TB. (Source: Jim Taylor's DVD FAQ).

United States

The US produces approximately 37% of the world's CD-audio titles, 50% of the world's CD-ROM
titles and 60% of the world's DVD titles. (Sources: Recording Industry Association of America,
International Recording Media Association, and Jim Taylor's DVD FAQ).

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) reports the number of new releases and
album re-releases each year. In 1998, 33,100 titles were released, roughly equivalent to 22 TB.

The US share of the CD-ROM replication market is 52%, according to the International Recording
Media Association. If we assume that the US holds a similar share of CD-ROM title production, then
about 500 titles are produced by the United States each year, equivalent to about 1 TB per year.

For the past three years, new DVD titles have been added at a rate of about 3,000 per year (13 TB
per year) --a tremendous rate of content growth, but that's because it is a new medium and a
significant amount of legacy content is being converted. This rate should decrease as the medium
becomes more well-established. (Source: DVD Entertainment Group)

Stock

The All Music Guide (a comprehensive database tool used by industry leaders) reports a total of
523,363 titles (445,735 popular music and 77,628 classical music albums). If each work were
stored on a 650 MB CD, this would be equivalent to 340 TB. We can assume that this figure
represents the US portion of original works, then extrapolate the world stock to be about 1,400,000
titles. [???]

According to the 1999 edition of CD-ROMs in Print, internationally there are about 16,200 unique
CD-ROM titles (about 11 TB)--business applications (such as word processing and spreadsheet
packages), games, reference tools, and instructional programs. This figure is consistent with other
CD-ROM directories, such as the Multimedia & CD-ROM Directory, which lists 17,000 titles.

The United States produces about two-thirds of the total DVD titles. As of June 2000, there are
about 8,500 titles available in the United States, 13,000 worldwide. This is equivalent to 37 TB (US)
and 57 TB (world).

Rate of Change

Production of CD-Audio and CD-ROM originals is not increasing dramatically. However, the
production of DVD originals is growing at a tremendous rate (about 100% per year), due to the fact
that material previously available in another format is being reissued on DVD.

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Optical

Copies

Flow

Replication

In 1999, there were about 4.7 million audio CDs and 3.6 million CD-ROMs replicated worldwide,
according to the International Recording Media Association (IRMA). In addition, in 1999 194 million
DVD-Video units, 12 million DVD-ROM units, and 2 million DVD-Audio units were replicated.

A total of 1.583 billion recordable CDs (CD-Rs) were sold around the world in 1999, according to
Santa Clara Consulting Group. (Source: News Release, "Record sales drive Memorex up to third in
world CD market" www.lewisvpr.com/Releases/UKReleases/000620_memorex.html) Estimates of
growth in demand for CD-R vary--one consulting firm projects global demand to reach 4.74 billion in
the year 2000, while others project demand to be between 2.5 and 3 billion units. (Photonics
Industry & Technology Development Association, cited in www.taiwanheadlines.gov)

Retail

During 1999, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), 938.9 million
CDs were shipped to retail by U.S. producers. The US has a 37% share of the world's sales,
according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). Therefore, one can
extrapolate that CD shipments worldwide are about 2,500 million units. This is equivalent to 1,625
TB.

According to the DVD Entertainment Group, more than 130 million DVD video movies and music
video titles were shipped to retail between spring 1997 (when the format launched) and January
2000. 100 million discs were shipped during 1999 alone.

Stock

The stock of audio CDs in the United States can be estimated by summing the CD unit sales since
the format became popular. The RIAA only provides statistics going back to 1990 - these 10 years
of shipments add up to 6,200 million units, equivalent to about 4,030 TB. Ten years of worldwide
shipments are approximately 15.2 billion units, equivalent to 10,937 TB.

Since the format was launched in 1997, more than 1.5 billion DVDs have been replicated
worldwide, almost 1 billion in North America alone.

Optical Media Bibliography

● All Music Guide

● The CD Information Center
● CD-ROMs in Print, 13th Edition: An International Guide to CD-ROM, CD-I, 3DO, MMCD,
CD32, Multimedia, Laserdisc, and Electronic Products. New York: The Gale Group, 1999.
● CD-ROM Finder: The World of CD-ROM Products for Information Seekers. Medford, NJ:
Learned Information, 1993
● The International Recording Media Association
● DVD Channel News
● DVD Entertainment Group
● DVD FAQ
● DVD Insider
● International Federation of the Phonographic Industry

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Optical
● Medialine
● Optical Storage Technology Association
● SUN CD-ROM FAQ

Charts

Click here to see charts supporting the above estimates, with time-series data.

More Discussion

Click here to read additional discussion of the conversion factors and related issues and to obtain
detailed bibliographical information.

© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Magnetic

■ Originals
● Flow
❍ Tape
❍ Disks
● Stock
❍ Tape
❍ Disks
■ Copies
● Flow
❍ Tape
❍ Disks
● Stock
❍ Tape
❍ Disks
■ More Details

Originals

Flow

Tape

Analog
Video

In the year 2000, 1.4 billion blank VHS video tapes will be produced for the entire world. If all of these
tapes were filled to their 120 minute capacity and then converted to digital using MPEG-2 compression,
there would be approximately 4 gigabytes of data per tape. One year's production of blank videotape,
therefore, provides storage space adequate for 5600 petabytes of data.

Assuming twenty percent [???] of this tape is used for the storage of original data, the flow of new data
stored on analog VHS videotape per year would be 1120 petabytes.

Video camcorder tapes (all formats except VHS) are produced at the rate of 150 million per year
according to the Japan Recording Media Industry Association. Almost all of this tape is used for the
storage of original data. Assuming one hour per tape in MPEG-2 format yields 300 petabytes.

Total original analog video production worldwide runs at about 1420 petabytes annually. [???]

Audio

In the year 2000, 921 million blank audio tape cassettes will be produced for the entire world according to
British research firm, Understanding & Solutions. If all of these tapes were filled to their 120 minute
capacity and then converted to digital using the common CD audio format, there would be approximately
1 gigabyte of data per tape. One year's production of blank audiotape, therefore, provides storage space
adequate for 921 petabytes of data.

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Magnetic

Assuming twenty percent [???] of this tape were used for the storage of original data, the flow of new
data stored on analog audiotape per year would be 184.2 petabytes.

Digital

There are 25 million computer tape drives installed in the world at present. These drives provide storage
capacity for all range of computers - from desktop personal computers to the most mammoth
supercomputers. Fred Moore estimates that the amount of data stored on tape is between 4 and 15
times the amount of enterprise data on disks and that there is about $1 billion per year of computer tape
media sold worldwide.

In order to estimate the amount of data stored on tape, we will first estimate the number of enterprise
storage systems and then multiply by 10. IDC estimates that 250 petabytes of RAID storage capacity will
be shipped worldwide in 2000. RAID storage systems are taken as most closely approximating the
storage capacity deployed to data-intensive corporate, government and scientific uses, the largest
consumers of magnetic tape backup.

A midrange estimate of the total amount of data stored on magnetic tape would, therefore, be 2.5
exabytes.

In all but the largest computer applications, however, tape is generally used solely for backup of data
already stored on hard disk drives. Quantum, the manufacturer of DLT tape, the most popular format for
enterprise storage, estimates that 90 percent of the tape capacity in that format is used for backup. Fred
Moore also points out that it is more and more common for multiple copies of data to now be stored on
tape.

If it is assumed that ten percent of the total amount of data stored on tape is original data of the sort
generated by scientific experiments in high-energy physics or by observational earth satellites or archival
storage on tape where the data is no longer stored on disk, original magnetic tape data is roughly the
same as all the RAID capacity shipped annually - 250 petabytes in the year 2000.

250 petabytes is also generally consistent with estimates derived by use of forecasts of producer
revenue of around $1 billion for tape media and an average cost of around $5 per gigabyte of tape
storage.
Disks
Floppy Disks

In the year 2000, 1 billion 3.5 inch floppy disks, each capable of storing 1.44 megabytes, will be
produced for the world. This is an aggregate storage capacity of 1.4 petabytes. If [???] five percent of
this is original data, new data per year on floppy disk would be 0.07 petabytes.

Removable Disks

In the year 2000, 88 million removable 100 megabyte disks and 25 million removable 1 gigabyte disks
will be produced for the world. Together, these two varieties of removable disks provide 33.8 petabytes
of storage capacity. If five [???] percent of this is original data, new data per year stored on removable
disks would be 1.69 petabytes.

Hard Disks

In the year 2000, hard disk drives capable of storing 2500 petabytes of data will be produced for the
world.

The amount of original data stored on hard disks is most likely to vary according to the computing
environment in which the disks are deployed. It is possible to divide all hard disk storage into three
categories:

1. Personal computer, laptop, or workstation. This type of computer is responsible for approximately
55% of the computer disk storage capacity currently shipped.
2. Departmental server. This class of computing environment is responsible for about 30% of the
overall storage market.
3. Enterprise server. These big computers account for about 15% of the hard disk storage.

As with all such broad categorizations, there may be quite a bit of blurring around the edges. However,

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Magnetic
consideration of these three different environments leads to the conclusion that the amount of original
data stored on the computers in each is probably substantially different.

Single user computers and the applications software usually found on them is not suited for the
production of large amounts of original data. A recent study (McKenzie, "Microsoft's 'Applications Barrier
to Entry': The Missing 70,000 Programs") found that most people used only a few applications other than
those found in the Microsoft Office application suite. These applications are usually text-based, such as
word processing or spreadsheets, and so require minimal storage space. Most personal computers now
sold come with hard disk storage capacity in the range of 10 gigabytes. 100 megabytes of original data
constitutes 1 percent of disk capacity, which is the estimate for this category of computer disk. [???]

Departmental servers would be commonly found in business, government, educational or other

organizational settings. These servers provide disk space for a group of users, who all contribute to the
production of organizational data. Aside from the databases and spreadsheets, there may be product
catalogs and other graphic intensive marketing material, PowerPoint presentations, and so on. An
estimate of the original data stored in these hard disks is 35%. [???]

Enterprise servers are the large-scale computing environments where "big iron" traditionally has reigned.
The applications here are corporate or governmental transaction processing on a large scale or the
generation of huge data sets from scientific research missions. The amount of original data stored on
these computers is estimated at around 65%. [???]
Table 1: Original Data Stored On Hard Disk By Computing Environment (1995-1999) [In Petabytes]
Original 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999
Data Total Original Total Original Total Original Total Original Total Original
Personal 1% 58 0.6 101 1 189 2 399 4 766 8
Departmental 35% 32 15 55 19 114 40 239 84 460 161
Enterprise 65% 16 8 27 17 41 27 86 56 167 109
Total: 105 23.6 183 37 344 69 724 144 1,393 278

Table 2: Original Data Stored On Hard Disk By Computing Environment (2000-2004) [In Petabytes]
Original 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004
Data Total Original Total Original Total Original Total Original Total Original
Personal 1% 1,405 14 2,553 26 4,466 45 7,165 72
Departmental 35% 843 295 1,532 536 2,680 938 4,299 1,505
Enterprise 65% 306 199 557 362 974 633 1,563 1,016
Total: 2,554 508 4,642 924 8,120 1,616 13,027 2,593
The amount of original data compared to the total amount of data stored on magnetic hard disks works
out to twenty percent over all the years under consideration. Accordingly, in the following table
summarizing the annual flow of original data in various media, 20% of all hard disks are assumed to
store original data, the actual amount will vary depending on the capacity of the hard drive itself.
Table 3: Original Data Flow Storage Estimates
Unique Items per Total Annual
Media Type Year Conversion Factor Petabytes (World)
1 gb per tape (CD
audio format - no
Blank Audio Tape (2000) 184,200,000 compression) 184.2
4 gb per tape
(MPEG-2
Blank Video Tape (2000) 355,000,000 compression) 1420
Computer Tape Drives (2000) 5,000,000 Varies 250
Floppy Disk (2000) 5,000,000 1.44 mb per disk 0.07
100 mb (low
4,400,000 capacity)

Removable Disks (2000) 1,250,000 1 gb (high capacity) 1.69

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Magnetic

Hard Disks (2000) 37,400,000 Varies 500

Stock of Originals

Tape

Analog
Video

[???] 10 billion video cassettes, both prerecorded and recorded at home, have been accumulated. This is
equivalent to about five years production of these tapes. One billion camcorder format tapes have also
been added over the same time. This would be equivalent to 3 billion hours of stored original video,
which if digitally encoded would produce a stock of about 6000 petabytes of original videotaped data.
[???]

Audio

The total stock of original audio content stored on tape may be estimated by assuming twenty [???]
percent of five years production of blank cassette tapes contains original content. This equals 1 billion
cassette tapes. The digital equivalent of this audio information is 1000 petabytes.
Digital
The stock of original data on magnetic tape may be approximated by adding the yearly flow of original
data over the course of the expected lifetime of the medium. Some unfortunate experiences with the loss
of computer data stored on magnetic tape has led to the practice of continuous migration of this data to
new media every five to ten years. This process leads to the reduction in the number of tape cartridges
that need to be managed as tape capacity inexorably rises as well as insuring modernization of the tape
format.

Therefore, the stock of original data on magnetic tape may be taken as five year's worth of original data
flow. [???]
Disks
Floppy Disks

Floppy disks useful life is estimated to be three years. The amount of original data stored on the 4.5
billion floppies produced over the course of the past three years is around 5 percent of the total data on
those disks, or 0.32 petabytes.

Removable Disks

The amount of original data stored on removable disks over the past three years is approximately 5
petabytes.

Hard Disks

Over the past three years, hard disk capacity of 4625 petabytes has been produced. If twenty [???]
percent of that capacity has been used to store original content, the stock in that format is now 925
petabytes.

Copies

Flow

Tape

Analog
Video

In the year 2000 1.8 billion prerecorded video tapes will be distributed worldwide according to the
International Recording Media Association. This entire production will be copies, principally of feature
films. If converted to digital using MPEG-2 compression, prerecorded videotape would consume 7,200
petabytes per year.

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Magnetic
If [???] 80 percent of the blank videotape distributed per year were used for copies, this would constitute
a digital equivalent of 4,480 petabytes.

The total yearly world production of copied data on analog videotape, therefore, is 11,680 petabytes.
[???]

Audio

In the year 1999, 125 million prerecorded audio cassette tapes were distributed in the United States
according to the Recording Industry Association of America. This entire production was copies,
principally of music. If converted to digital using audio CD format, and assuming about one hour of music
per tape, prerecorded audio tape would consume 62.5 petabytes per year.

If 80 percent [???] of the 921 million blank audiotapes distributed per year worldwide were used for
copies, this would constitute a digital equivalent of 737 petabytes.

The total yearly production of copied data on analog audiotape, therefore, is 800 petabytes.
Digital
If ninety percent of the computer tape distributed annually were used for copies, this would constitute
2.25 exabytes of copied data for the year 2000. The amount of data on tape, however, is calculated by
reference to the RAID storage capacity shipped, which has been rising rapidly. Similar trends will most
likely be seen in the amount of data stored on tape, particularly as it becomes more common to make
multiple tape copies of data.
Disks
Floppy Disks

If 95 [???] percent of the 1.4 petabytes of annual floppy disk storage were used for copies of data, this
would add 1.33 petabytes to the stock of digital data stored on floppy disks.

Removable Disks

If 95 [???] percent of the 33.8 petabytes of annual removable disk storage were used for copies of data,
this would add 32.1 petabytes to the stock of digital data stored on removable disks.

Hard Disks

If 80 [???] percent of the 2500 petabytes of annual hard disk storage were used for copies of data, this
would add 2000 petabytes to the stock of digital data stored on hard disks.
Stock of Copies

Tape

Analog
Video

Five years production of blank T-120 VHS videotapes is approximately 7 billion units. If 80 [???] percent
of this were used for storage of copied data, the total stock of such data in MPEG-2 conversion would be
2240 petabytes. Five years production of prerecorded videotapes is approximately 8 billion units. This is
the digital equivalent of 3200 petabytes. The total world stock of copied data on videotape is 5440
petabytes.

Audio

The world production of blank audiotape for the past five years is approximately 5 billion units. There has
also been sales of prerecorded audiotapes during that period of 6 billion units. Assuming that 80 [???]
percent of the blank audiotape has been used for the storage of copied data, the overall stock of copies
of audio data on tape is 4000 petabytes on blank tape and 6000 petabytes on prerecorded tape.
Therefore, there is a total stock of 10,000 petabytes of copies of audio data on magnetic tape.
Digital
Ninety percent of the data stored on tape is copies and tape is estimated to store 4 to 15 the amount of
enterprise data on hard disk. IDC estimates that approximately 400 petabytes of RAID have been
shipped in the past three years. If all data on tape is calculated as ten times that amount, or 4 exabytes,
and copies as 90 percent of that overall amount, copies of data on magnetic tape worldwide would be 3.6
exabytes.

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Magnetic
Disks
Floppy Disks

There have been 4.5 billion floppy disks produced in the last three years, creating a total storage
capacity of 6.5 petabytes. If 95 percent of that storage were used for copies, the total stock of copies on
floppy disk would be 6.1 petabytes.

Removable Disks

Over the past three years approximately 100 petabytes have been stored on removable disk. Assuming
that 95 [???] percent of that is backups and copies, the total stock of copied data in this media format is
95 petabytes.

Hard Disks

Over the past three years, hard disk capacity of 4625 petabytes has been produced. If eighty [???]
percent of that capacity has been used to store copies of data, the stock of copied data on hard disk is
3700 petabytes.
More Details

© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Internet

■ Introduction
■ World Wide Web
■ Email & Mailing Lists
■ Usenet
■ FTP
■ IRC, Messaging Services, Telnet, ...
■ References

The Internet is one of the youngest and fastest growing media in today's world. Internet growth is
still accelerating, which indicates that the Internet has not yet reached its highest expansion period
[1]. It should be noted, however, that while the Internet is a completely new kind of medium, by
separating it into a distinct category, we are allowing for a certain amount of double counting,
because all the Internet-based stock of information is already accounted for under "magnetic" or
"tape" categories. Furthermore, we should make clear the distinction between the stock and the flow
of information. While web sites and some portion of email messages are being stored and
accounted for under different storage categories, there are other "components" of what we know as
"Internet," such as Internet Relay Chat (IRC) or Telnet, which exist only as a flow of communication.
What makes the Internet extremely successful is that it is one of a handful of media (such as radio
and TV), where one unit of storage might generate terabytes of flow, as opposed to books and
newspapers, where one exemplar is usually read by one or two people, and the flow of information
is relatively low.

World Wide Web

There are two groups of Web content. One, which we would call the "surface" Web is what
everybody knows as the "Web," a group that consists of static, publicly available web pages, and
which is a relatively small portion of the entire Web. Another group is called the "deep" Web, and it
consists of specialized Web-accessible databases and dynamic web sites, which are not widely
known by "average" surfers, even though the information available on the "deep" Web is 400 to 550
times larger than the information on the "surface." [2]

The "surface" Web consists of approximately 2.5 billion documents [1 and 5], up from 1 billion pages
at the beginning of the year [3], with a rate of growth of 7.3 million pages per day [1]. Estimates of
the average "surface" page size vary in the range from 10 kbytes [1] per page to 20 kbytes per page
[4]. So, the total amount of information on the "surface" Web varies somewhere from 25 to 50
terabytes of information [HTML-included basis]. If we want to obtain a figure for textual information,
we would use a factor of 0.4 [4], which leads to an estimate of 10 to 20 terabytes of textual content.
At 7.3 billion new pages added every day, the rate of growth is [taking an average estimate] 0.1
terabytes of new information [HTML-included] per day.

If we take into account all web-accessible information, such as web-connected databases, dynamic
pages, intranet sites, etc., collectively known as "deep" Web, there are 550 billion web-connected
documents, with an average page size of 14 kbytes, and 95% of this information is publicly
accessible [2]. If we were to store this information in one place, we would need 7,500 terabytes of

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Internet
storage, which is 150 times more storage than we would need for the entire "surface" Web, even
taking the highest estimate of 50 terabytes. 56% of this information is the actual content [HTML
excluded], which gives us an estimate of 4,200 terabytes of high-quality data. Two of the largest
"deep" web sites - National Climatic Data Center and NASA databases - contain 585 terabytes of
information, which is 7.8% of the "deep" web. And 60 of the largest web sites contain 750 terabytes
of information, which is 10% of the "deep" web.

When we look at the distribution of the web sites, the most apparent trend is that English loses its
dominant position. Currently, only 50% of all Internet users are native English speakers, though
English web sites continue to dominate with approximately 78% of all web sites and 96% of
e-commerce web sites being in English [6]. It's hard to estimate what percentage of web sites have
their origins in the United States, because .com domains can be registered in virtually any country,
English-language web sites are often created in countries like Japan, and many international web
sites are hosted in the United States. 17 million out of 27.5 million domains registered worldwide are
.com, and 2 million are .uk, making Great Britain's domain the biggest country domain in the world
[7].

More Details

Email & Mailing Lists

Email has become one of the most widespread ways of communication in today's society. A
white-collar worker receives about 40 email messages in his office every day [8]. Aggregately,
based on different estimates, there will be from 610 billion [9] to 1100 billion [10] messages sent this
year alone. With the average size of an email message 18,500 bytes [11] and growing, the amount
of flow becomes surprisingly gigantic, somewhere between 11,285 and 20,350 terabytes. Of
course, not all of this email gets stored. Mail.com has 14.5 million email boxes and uses 27
terabytes of storage; with approximately 500 million mailboxes worldwide, the required storage
space is more than 900 terabytes, which means that only one in 17 messages is kept for some
period of time.

Mailing lists can be viewed as a subcategory in email. It is hard to determine the number of mailing
lists in existence, but we can approximate it based on some available statistics. One of the most
frequently used mailing list managers - LISTSERV - is used to send 30 million messages per day in
approximately 150,000 mailing lists [12]. A sample of mailing lists has shown that 30% of them are
managed using LISTSERV. Using this information, we would estimate the total number of mailing
list messages at 36.5 billion per year with aggregate volume of 675 terabytes.

Distribution of mailboxes has the same pattern as the distribution of web sites. While in 1984, 90%
of the world's e-mailboxes were located in the U.S., at the end of 1999 this number dropped to 59%,
and is expected to decrease even further. [13].

More Details

Usenet

Most of the statistics in this category are vague, so the numbers we have should be regarded with a
certain skepticism. Cidera, which is the 14th biggest news provider on the Internet [14], gets
approximately 0.150 terabytes of Usenet feeds per day. We would estimate the total amount of
original news feeds at 0.2 terabytes per day, which leads to 73 terabytes of original Usenet
postings per year, which are redistributed by local ISPs and news servers an endless number of
times.

FTP

We are missing any significant data on this sector, but we know that Walnut Creek CD-ROM archive
contains a total of 0.412 terabytes of data on two servers [ftp.cdrom.com and ftp.freesoftware.com]
and the amount of storage was expanding at 100% every year over the past 6 years [15]. It should
be noticed that the distinction between FTP and HTTP becomes more blurred, as more and more
file archives become available through HTTP.

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Internet

IRC, Messaging Services, Telnet...

These categories mostly represent a flow of information as opposed to the stock. Liszt.com has one
of the biggest directories of IRC channels - 37750 channels on 27 networks, with 150,000 users, all
of them typing text as fast as they can. [16]

References

[1] "Sizing the Internet," Cyveillance, http://www.cyveillance.com/resources/library.asp

[2] "The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value," BrightPlanet LLC,
http://www.completeplanet.com/Tutorials/DeepWeb/index.asp
[3] "Web Surpasses One Billion Documents," Inktomi Corp.,
http://www.inktomi.com/new/press/billion.html
[4] "Accessibility of Information on the Web," Nature Magazine, Volume 400, Number 6740, Page
107
[5] "Size of the Web: A Dynamic Essay for a Dynamic Medium," The Censorware Project,
http://censorware.org/web_size/
[6] "State of the Internet 2000," United States Internet Council & ITTA
Inc.,http://usic.wslogic.com/intro.html
[7] "Domain Statistics," DomainStats.com, http://www.domainstats.com
[8] "Sending AOL a Message," Newsweek, Aug 9, 1999, p.51
[9] "Email Facts," 24/7 Media, http://www.247media.com/research/trends/email.html
[10] "Like It Or Not, You've Got Mail," BusinessWeek,
http://businessweek.com/1999/99_40/b3649026.htm
[11] UC Berkeley Email Stats
[12] "LISTSERV Statistics," L-Soft, http://www.lsoft.com/news/default.asp?item=statistics
[13] "Year-End 1999 Mailbox Report," Messaging Online, http://www.messagingonline.com/
[14] "Top 1000 Usenet Sites" Freenix, http://www.freenix.org/reseau/top1000/
[15] David Greenman, Walnut Creek CD-ROM Archive
[16] Liszt.Com, http://www.liszt.com/

© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Broadcast

■ Originals
❍ World
❍ United States
● Radio
● Television
● Stock
● Rate of Change
■ Copies
● Radio
● Television
■ Fun Facts
■ Bibliography
■ Charts

Originals

World

Table 1: World
Unique Total Terabytes (Annual)
Number of Items per Conversion
Media Type Stations Year Factor Lower Bound Upper Bound
65.5 million
Radio (CIA Factbook hours of
43,973 .05 GB/hour 3,274 3,274
2000) original
programming
48 million
Television (broadcast
hours of 1.3 GB - 2.25
only) (CIA Factbook 33,071 62,769 108,638
original GB hour
2000)
programming
Total: 66,043 111,912

Table 1: United States

Unique Total Terabytes (Annual)
Number of Items per Conversion
Media Type Stations Year Factor Lower Bound Upper Bound

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Broadcast

15.8 million
Radio (FCC, 1999) 12,600 .05 GB/hour 788 TB 788 TB
hours
3.4 million
Television (broadcast
hours of 1.3 GB- 2.25
and cable networks) 1,884 4,470 TB 7,736 TB
original GB/hour
(FCC, NCTA, 1999)
programming
Total: 5,258 8,524 TB

Radio

Conversion Factor

Each hour of audio requires about 50 MB, if stored at MP3 quality. (Different sources cite different
figures, depending upon assumptions made about compression and sound quality.)

World

There are 43,773 active radio stations in the world, according to the CIA World Factbook 2000: about
16,500 AM stations, 26,000 FM stations, and 1,500 shortwave stations.

We estimate that FM radio stations broadcast 20 hours per day, AM stations 16 hours per day, and
shortwave stations 12 hours per day. Therefore, there are approximately 290 million hours (188 million
FM, 98 million AM, and 6 million shortwave) of radio programming per year. Applying the 50 MB/hour
rule of thumb, one may estimate an annual storage requirement of about 14,500 TB if one were to
record everything broadcast on the radio.

United States

As of 1999, there are 12,615 radio stations in the United States, according the Federal Communications
Commission: 4,783 AM, 5,766 FM and 2,066 FM Educational stations. As noted above, the two formats
broadcast different numbers of hours each day: 20 hours for FM stations, 16 hours for AM. Total US
broadcasting hours would therefore be roughly 85 million hours per year. Again, each hour of
broadcasting would require 50 MB of storage, using the MP3 format. Total storage required for all US
radio broadcasts is about 4,300 TB.

About 84% of US radio stations have music as their primary focus, and provide little original content.
(Source: Radio Marketing Guide & Fact Book, Radio Advertising Bureau 2000-2001) The remaining
16% are news, talk and religious stations, providing, presumably, almost 100% "original" information
each day. Regardless of format, a percentage of most stations' broadcast time includes some
commentary, weather reports, news updates, and traffic reports - perhaps an average of 5 minutes per
hour. In addition, radio stations average between 12 and 16 minutes of commercials per hour. We can
use this information to estimate how much "original" programming appears on the United States radio
airwaves:15.8 million hours. (This estimate excludes advertisements and music.) The equivalent in
bytes is 788 TB.

Television

Conversion Factor

Satellite TV transmits between 3 and 5 mb per second. Therefore, one hour of broadcasting will require
10.8-18 Gbits of storage (compressed to MPEG-2). We can estimate about 1.3 - 2.25 GB per hour of
TV broadcasting. Source: Internet Archive.

World

There are 33,071 television stations in the world, according to the CIA World Factbook 2000. If these
stations broadcast about 16 hours per day, this would equal about 193 million hours total programming.
We estimate about 1/4 of the programs are "original," - this is 48 million hours each year. Estimating
that one hour of video requires 1.3 GB of storage, then worldwide, program storage would be about
63,000 TB; using the 2.25 GB estimate, it would be about 109,000 TB.

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Broadcast
United States

As of 1999, there are 1,616 broadcast television stations in the United States, according the US Federal
Communications Commission. This figure includes the major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, PBS
and newcomers WB, UPN and PAX), the networks' affiliates, as well as local and public broadcasting
stations. In addition, the National Cable Television Association reports that there are 210 national cable
networks and 54 regional networks, as of August 2000. (54 more cable networks are planned but not
yet operational.)

If all 1,884 of these stations broadcast 20 hours per day, that would equal just under 14 million hours
per year. We estimate that about 1/4 of the television programs broadcast are "original" - this is 3.5
million hours each year, equivalent to between 4,400 and 7,800 TB.

Stock

In 55 years of programming, the networks have accumulated the following stock of material (Source:
Library of Congress Report, Television/Video Preservation Study: Volume 1: Report, October 1997).

Table 3: Stock of Material Accumulated by the Major Networks.

ABC 1,037,000 films/tapes
CBS 1,045,000 tapes and more than 150,000,000 feet of film
600,000 film reels (currently estimated at 100,000,000 feet) and
NBC 1,600,000 videotapes

Meanwhile, some of the major studios have accumulated original materials as well:

Table 4: Materials Accumulated by the Major Studios.

Disney 6,500 television programs on 80,000 reels and tapes
Fox 54,000 television programs on 780,000 reels and tapes
18,000 (through 1994) television programs on 217,000 reels and
MCA/Universal tapes
Paramount
(Viacom) 8,000 television programs on 1,200,000 reels and tapes
Sony/Columbia 35,000 television programs on 600,000 reels and tapes
Turner
Entertainment 20,000 television programs on 337,000 reels and tapes
Warner
Brothers 28,000 television programs on 1,000,000 reels and tapes

These figures overlap, of course, with those we have compiled for magnetic tape.

As of 1998, there are well over 18,000 hours of programs in syndication available to be aired. This is
equivalent to 18 TB of information. (Source: Television and Video Almanac 1998)

Rate of Change

The number of radio stations and broadcast television stations in the United States has increased
slightly - between 1 and 2% - every year since 1990.

While the number of cable television systems has decreased since 1993, the number of cable networks
(i.e. channels) has increased annually. 54 new cable networks are scheduled to be launched in the
coming year.

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Broadcast

Copies

Radio

World

We estimate that FM radio stations broadcast 20 hours per day, AM stations 16 hours per day, and
shortwave stations 12 hours per day. Therefore, there are approximately 290 million hours (188 million
FM, 98 million AM, and 6 million shortwave) of radio programming per year. Applying the 50 MB/hour
rule of thumb, one may estimate an annual storage requirement of about 14,500 TB if one were to
record everything broadcast on the radio.

United States

As of 1999, there are 12,615 radio stations in the United States, according the Federal
Communications Commission: 4,783 AM, 5,766 FM and 2,066 FM Educational stations. As noted
above, the two formats broadcast different numbers of hours each day: 20 hours for FM stations and 16
hours for AM. Total US broadcasting hours would therefore be roughly 85 million hours per year.
Again, each hour of broadcasting would require 50 MB of storage, using the MP3 format. Total storage
required for all US radio broadcasts is about 4,300 TB.

Television

World

There are about 33,000 television stations in the world (including some but not all cable stations),
according to the CIA World Factbook 2000. This means that there are approximately 193 million hours
of television programming per year (assuming each station broadcasts 16 hours per day). Estimating
that one hour of video requires 1.3 - 2.25 GB of storage, then worldwide, television would require
between 250,000 and 435,000 TB.

United States

As of 1999, there are 1,616 broadcast television stations in the United States as well as about 260
cable networks operating on nearly 10,500 cable systems. Each station broadcasts an average of 7,300
hours per year (again estimating 20 hours of broadcasting per day). If one wished to capture all of the
programming generated by every station and cable system, regardless of duplication, it would be about
88 million hours, requiring between 114,000 and 198,000 TB of storage.

Fun Facts about Broadcast Media.

Television
■ For many years, most large TV stations and the major networks subscribed to the Code of Good
Practices of the National Association of Broadcasting, which established limits on the number of
commercial minutes that could be telecast each hour. The limits were voluntary but widely
followed: 9 1/2 minutes of commercials during primetime; higher amounts during other times of
night and day. In 1992, however, the guidelines were ruled a violation of Federal antitrust law.
Throughout the industry, most pledged to continue the limits - but gradually that eroded, as
networks added more ad time. Prime time today has an average of 15 minutes of ads per hour.
The FCC regulates advertising only during children's programming: 10.5 minutes/hour on
weekends, 12 minutes/hour on weekdays. (Source: Gerald Baldasty, University of Washington
http://faculty.washington.edu/baldasty/Feb3.htm)
■ Approximately 7 in 10 television households, more than 65 million households, subscribe to
cable. (Source: National Cable Television Association)
Radio
■ There are currently more than 4,500 streaming radio stations on the Internet, distributed as
follows: Africa (16); Asia (109); Europe (970); North America (2,786); Oceania (235); South
America (166) and Internet Only (313). (Source: RadioDirectory,
http://www.radiodirectory.com/Stations/)

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/how-much-info/broadcast.html (4 of 5) [11/10/2000 2:11:25 PM]

Broadcast

■ "Talk radio," in which celebrities and experts from various fields answer listener "call-in"
questions and offer their advice on various topics, has grown spectacularly in recent years. The
"call-in" format is the fastest-growing in radio, accounting for nearly 1,000 of the 10,000
commercial radio stations in the United States. (Source: U.S. MEDIA IN THE 1990s: THE
BROADCAST MEDIA By Fredric A. Emmert, US Information Agency)
■ 6,108 new radio stations have been started in United States since 1970 (Source: Arbitron
Ratings, http://www.arbitronratings.com)
■ The average US listener 12 and older hears approximately 1,100 hours of radio each year.
(Source: Arbitron Ratings, http://www.arbitronratings.com)
■ Since 1996, commercial spot loads have averaged 12-16 minutes per hour. These averages can
be even higher during morning and afternoon drive hours. (Source: "An Analysis of the Effects of
Consolidation on the Radio Industry" http://mmstudio.gannon.edu/~gabriel/rapela.html.)

Bibliography

■ Arbitron Ratings http://www.arbitronratings.com/

■ Castleman, Harry. Podrazik, Walter J. The TV schedule book : four decades of network
programming from sign-on to sign-off. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984.
■ Central Intelligence Agency World Factbook 2000 http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/
■ Federal Communications Commission Audio Services Division, Broadcast Station Totals, 1990 -
1999 http://www.fcc.gov/mmb/asd/totals/index.html
■ Fletcher, William H. Making Instructional Digital Video and Audio Work,
http://miniappolis.com/mpeg/mpeg.html. April 1998.
■ Internet Archive. Phone 415-561-6767 or see http://www.archive.org/
■ National Cable Television Association http://www.ncta.com/directory.html
■ International Television and Video Almanac. New York: Quigley Publishing, 1998.
■ UNESCO, Latest statistics on radio and television broadcasting. Paris: UNESCO [United Nations
Organization for Education, Science and Culture] Division of Statistics on Culture and
Communication, 1987.
■ U.S. Census Department, 1999 Statistical Abstract of the United States,
www.census.gov/prod/www/statistical-abstract-us.html
See chart for more details

© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Phone

The material in this section is drawn from Coffman and Odlyzko (1998, 2000).
The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) database provides estimates of telephone traffic
for 207 countries for 1997-98, which total 2.5 x 1012 minutes per year. Adding in an estimate for the
missing countries brings us to 7.5 x 1012 minutes per year, or roughly 600,000 terabytes per month.
Compression would reduce storage requirements by a factor of 6 to 8.
The US accounts for about 250,000 terabytes per month, of which roughly a third is modem calls.

We have somewhat better estimates for long-distance traffic in the US, including voice, Internet,
public data networks and private lines.

Table 1: Traffic on U.S. long distance networks in terabytes, year-end 1999.

Network Traffic (terabytes/month)
US voice 48,000
Internet 10,000 - 16,000
Other Public Data Networks 2,000
Private Line 5,000 - 8,500

Notes
■ Internet traffic has, on average, been doubling every year for 30 years, though the growth
rates varied significantly during that period.

■ The current rate of growth of Internet traffic is roughly 100% per year.

■ By 2002 data traffic will surpass phone traffic.

■ Residential Internet use in the US is growing at about 30% a year. When residential users
switch to broadband, the total volume of data accessed increases by a factor of 5-10. As
residential broadband grows, traffic should approach the 100% per year growth rate.

■ Internal corporate (intranet) traffic is growing at about 30% per year, but corporate traffic to
the public Internet is growing at 100% per year.

■According to Peter Davidson, of Davidson Consulting, about 300 billion seconds of fax
transmissions take place annually. At 45 seconds per page, this means 400 billion pages per
year are faxed. At 15 Kb per page, this comes to around 6,000 terabytes of fax information
per year.
References
■ Internet growth: Is there a "Moore's Law" for data traffic?, K. G. Coffman and A. M.
Odlyzko, 2000. [Abstract] [PostScript] [PDF] [LaTeX]

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Phone

■ The size and growth rate of the Internet, K. G. Coffman and A. M. Odlyzko, First Monday
3(10) (October 1998), http://firstmonday.org/. [Abstract] [PostScript] [PDF] [LaTeX] [First
Monday version]

■ The Worldwide Fax Traffic Statistical Market Review and Forecast, 1997-2002, Peter
Davidson, [Link to Report]
© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Mail

This table of facts about US mail is from Odlyzko (2000). About half of all mail is currently first class
and about half is junk mail. If we assume 5 pages per piece of mail, and digitize it at 15 Kbytes per
page, 1998 US mail is about 150 petabytes per year.

Table 1: Statistics about US mail service, from Odlyzko (2000).

Year Cost Cost/GDP Pieces Mail per
(millions) (percent) (millions) Person
1790 0.032 0.02 0.8 0.20
1800 0.214 0.05 3.9 0.73
1810 0.496 0.09 7.7 1.07
1820 1.161 0.18 14.9 1.55
1830 1.933 0.21 29.8 2.32
1840 4.718 0.28 79.9 4.68
1850 5.213 0.20 155.1 6.66
1860 14.87 0.39
1870 24.00 0.33
1880 36.54 0.35
1890 66.26 0.51 4,005 63.7
1900 107.7 0.58 7,130 93.8
1910 230.0 0.65 14,850 161
1920 454.3 0.50
1930 803.7 0.89 27,887 227
1940 807.6 0.81 27,749 211
1950 2,223 0.78 45,064 299
1960 3,874 0.77 63,675 355
1970 7,876 0.81 84,882 418
1980 19,412 0.70 106,311 469
1990 40,490 0.70 166,301 669
1998 57,778 0.68 197,943 733

■ The history of communications and its implications for the Internet, A. M. Odlyzko.
[Abstract] [PostScript] [PDF] [LaTeX]
© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Acknowledgements

Overall
● Rita Gildea, EMC
● Jim Gray, Microsoft
● Andrew Odlyzko, AT&T Labs
● Dave Patterson, UC Berkeley
● Gil Press, EMC
● Robert Wilensky, UC Berkeley
Print
● Eric Chaskas, US National Archives and Records Administration
● Merilyn Dunn at CAPventure, via Kathy Jarvis at XeroxParc
● Rebecca Green and Lee Leighton, UC Berkeley Library
● Richard J. Hill, Newspapers Librarian, State Library of Pennsylvania
● Aimee Pyle and Amy Kirschoff, JSTOR
● Ginger Ogle, UC Berkeley Digital Library Project
● Rebecca Green and Lee Leighton, UC Berkeley Library
● Clara R. Williams, Information Consultant at the Hasleton Library, Institute of Paper Science
and Technology
Optical
● Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive
● Brian Lewin, International Recording Media Association
● Jim Taylor, DVD Association
Magnetic
● Fred Moore, Horizon Information Strategies
Telephone
● Peter Davidson, Davidson Consulting
Internet
● John McCredie and Jerry Berkman, UC Berkeley
● Steve Lawrence, NTT
● Scott Kirkpatrick, Archive.org
© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Site Map

About the Project

Charts
Sound Bytes
Data Powers of Ten

Executive Summary
Introduction
Information Produced by Medium
Qualifications
Duplication
Compression
Archival Media
World and US Production
Growth Rates
TV and Radio
Non-Digital Communication
Consumption of Information
Individual and Published Information
Appendices
Bibliography

Print Summary
Originals
Flow
World
United States
Notes on Conversion Assumptions
Stock
World
United States
Rate of Change
Copies
Flow
World
United States
Stock
Rate of Change
References
Charts
More Discussion

Print Details
Conversion Factors
Originals
Books
Conversion Factors

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Site Map
Flow
Stock
Rate of Change
Newspapers
Conversion Factors
Flow
Stock
Rate of Change
Periodicals
Conversion Factors
World
United States
Office Documents
Conversion Factors
Flow
Stock
Rate of Change
Visual Materials
Conversion Factors
Flow
Stock
Copies
Fun Facts About Print Media
Print Media Bibliography
Supporting Charts

Film Summary
Originals
Flow
Photographs
Motion Pictures
X-Rays
Stock
Photographs
Motion Pictures
X-Rays
Copies
Flow
Photographs
Motion Pictures
X-Rays
Stock
Photographs
Motion Pictures
X-Rays
References
More Details

Film Details
Impact of Digital Cameras on Rate of Growth of New Photographs
Conversion and Compression
Photographs
Motion Pictures
X-Rays
Flow of New X-Rays
Medical Imaging
Other X-Ray Uses
Copies

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Site Map
Copies of Motion Pictures
Film Factoids
References and Sources

Optical Summary
Originals
Flow
World
United States
Stock
Rate of Change
Copies
Flow
Stock
Optical Media Bibliography
Charts
More Discussion

Optical Details
Originals
Conversion Factors
Flow
World
United States
Stock
Copies
Flow
World
United States
Rate of Change
Bibliography
Charts

Magnetic Summary
Originals
Flow
Tape
Disks
Stock
Tape
Disks
Copies
Flow
Tape
Disks
Stock
Tape
Disks
More Details

Magnetic Details
Magnetic Storage Media
Hard Disk Drives
Floppy Disks
Removable Magnetic Disk Drives
Magnetic Tape

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Site Map
Digital Data Creation
Analog Storage Tape
Conversion Issues
References and Resources

Internet Summary
Introduction
World Wide Web
Email & Mailing Lists
Usenet
FTP
IRC, Messaging Services, Telnet, ...
References

Internet - WWW Details

"A Cyveillance Study: Sizing the Internet" Summarized
"The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value" Summarized
Excel Spreadsheet with further information.

Internet - Email Details

"Email Growth Hogs Enterprise Resources" Summarized
"AOL Per-User Email Figures Climb 60 Percent in 1999" Summarized
"Messaging Today: Worldwide Trends" Summarized
24/7 Media: Email Facts
Nov. 92 - Nov. 94 Messaging Statistics
Junk Email Statistics
Other Information
Final Thoughts

Broadcast - Summary
Originals
World
United States
Radio
Television
Stock
Rate of Change
Copies
Radio
Television
Fun Facts
Bibliography
Charts

Phone Summary

Mail Summary

Acknowledgements

Site Map

© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Sound Bytes

Terror of terabytes.
One terabyte, the smallest practical measure for our project, is a million megabytes, which is
equivalent to the textual content of a million books. An exabyte, which is what we use to report the
final results, is a billion gigabtyes.

Capabilities of compression.
Conversion to ASCII, MP3, MP4 and other compression technologies dramatically reduces storage
requirements by one to two orders of magnitude.

Democratization of data.
Individuals produce significant amounts of non-digital information. As photos and videos move to
digital formats, households will have to manage terabytes of data.

Dominance of digital.
Ninety-three percent of the information produced each year is stored in digital form. Hard drives in
stand-alone PCs account for 55% of total storage shipped each year.

Magnetic migration.
Print and film content is rapidly moving to magnetic and optical storage. This is true for professional
use now, and will become increasingly true at the level of individual users.

Tape in transition.
Magnetic tape is about 10 times as large as disk storage, but is used almost exclusively for
archives. Disk storage is much more attractive, even for archives, due to its rapidly declining cost
and the fact that it is much easier to access data stored on disk.

Paucity of print.
If all printed material published in the world each year were expressed in ASCII, it could be stored in
less than 5 terabytes.

Immensity of images.
Over 80 billion photographs are taken every year, which would take over 400 petabytes to store,
more than 80 million times the storage requirements for text.

Convenience of copies.
There is a lot of redundancy both across and within media. A newspaper, for example, is
composited using digital technology, printed on paper, then archived on microfilm. Estimates of
``unique'' information can only be taken as approximate.

Ubiquity of the US.

The US produces 35% of all print material, 40% of the images and well over 50% of the digitally
stored content produced in the world each year.

© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Charts

Here are some charts that show the relative sizes of various interesting magnitudes.

Over 93 percent of the information produced in 1999 was in digital format. (Authors' calculations.)

New books published in US. (US Statistical Abstract 1999, Table 938. Some years interpolated.)

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Charts

Newspapers and periodicals published in US. (US Statistical Abstract 1999, Table 941.)

Print summary. (Calculations by authors.)

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Charts

Photo summary. (Calculations by authors.)

Optical summary. (calculations by authors)

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Charts

Total and unique information on various types of hard drives. (Calculations by authors)

Worldwide PC hard drive capacity shipped. (1999 Winchester Disk Drive Market Forecast and Review,
Table C5, International Data Corporation report. Some years forecast.)

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Charts

Hard drive cost per gigabyte. (IDC reports.)

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Charts

Trends in EMC's stock price, megabytes per inch, and cost per megabyte. From Forbes, October 2,
2000.

US household media use. (US Statistical Abstract 1999, Table 920.)

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Charts
Activities performed by online households in the US during an average week, Q2, 2000.
(Economist Magazine, October 7, 2000, E-Entertainment Survey, page 11.)

Summary of upper estimate of worldwide information production. (Economist Magazine,

October, 2000)

Cost of transmitting 1000 words v Number of words available in USA 1960-1980. (Ithiel de
Sola Pool, Hiroshi Inose, Nozomu Takasaki, Roger Hurwitz, Communication Flows: A
Census in the United States and Japan, Elsevier Science Publishers, New York, 1984.)

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Charts

© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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About the Project

Senior Researchers: Peter Lyman and Hal R. Varian

Research Assistants: James Dunn, Aleksey Strygin, Kirsten Swearingen

This study is an attempt to measure how much information is produced in the world each year. We
look at several media and estimate yearly production, accumulated stock, rates of growth, and other
variables of interest.
If you want to understand what we've done, we offer different recommendations, depending on the
degree to which you suffer from information overload:

Heavy information overload: the world's total yearly production of print, film, optical, and magnetic
content would require roughly 1.5 billion gigabytes of storage. This is the equivalent of 250
megabytes per person for each man, woman, and child on earth.

Moderate information overload: read the Sound Bytes and look at the Charts illustrating our
findings.

Normal information overload: read the Executive Summary.

Information deprived: read the detailed reports by clicking on the contents to your left. Or
download the entire Web site as a PDF file. (It is about 100 pages.)

This study was produced by faculty and students at the School of Information Management and
Systems at the University of California at Berkeley. We gratefully acknowledge financial support
from EMC. We have put "[???]" in the text where we had to make "questionable" assumptions. If
you have suggestions, corrections, or comments, please send email to
[email protected]. We view this as a "living document" and intend to update it
based on such contributions.

© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Executive Summary

Abstract

The world produces between 1 and 2 exabytes of unique information per year, which is roughly 250
megabytes for every man, woman, and child on earth. An exabyte is a billion gigabytes, or 1018
bytes. Printed documents of all kinds comprise only .003% of the total. Magnetic storage is by far the
largest medium for storing information and is the most rapidly growing, with shipped hard drive
capacity doubling every year. Magnetic storage is rapidly becoming the universal medium for
information storage.

■ Introduction
■ Information Produced by Medium
■ Qualifications
● Duplication
● Compression
● Archival Media
● World and US Production
● Growth Rates
● TV and Radio
■ Non-Digital Communication
■ Consumption of Information
■ Individual and Published Information
■ Conclusion
■ About this Report
■ Appendices
■ Bibliography

Introduction

The cost of magnetic storage is dropping rapidly; as of Fall 2000 a gigabyte of storage costs less
than $10 and it is predicted that this cost will drop to $1 by 2005. Soon it will be technologically
possible for an average person to access virtually all recorded information. The natural question then
becomes: how much information is there to store? If we wanted to store "everything," how much
storage would it take?

We have conducted a study to answer this question. In particular, we have estimated yearly US and
world production of originals and copies for the most common forms of information media. We have
also attempted to estimate the cumulated stock of information in various formats. Finally, we have
described the magnitudes of some communication flows that are currently not stored but may well be

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Executive Summary
in the future.

Information produced by medium

Most information is stored in four physical media: paper, film, optical (CDs and DVDs), and magnetic.
There are very good data for the worldwide production of each storage medium, and there are
reasonably good estimates of how much original content is produced in each of these different
formats.

We have identified production of content by media type, translated the volume of original content into
a common standard (terabytes), determined how much storage each type takes under certain
assumptions about compression, attempted to adjust for duplication of content, and added up to get
total estimates.

Table 1 depicts yearly worldwide production of original stored content as of 1999. In general, the
upper estimate is based on the raw data, while the lower estimate reflects an attempt to adjust for
duplication and compression. We discuss these adjustments below and in the medium-specific
documents. Note that the growth rate estimates are very rough. See the "Qualifications" section and
Appendix A for further discussion; the details of the calculations are presented in the accompanying
documents.
Table 1: Worldwide production of original content, stored digitally using standard
compression methods, in terabytes circa 1999.
Storage Medium Type of Content Terabytes/Year, Terabytes/Year, Growth
Upper Estimate Lower Estimate Rate, %
Books 8 1 2
Newspapers 25 2 -2
Paper Periodicals 12 1 2
Office documents 195 19 2
Subtotal: 240 23 2
Photographs 410,000 41,000 5
Cinema 16 16 3
Film
X-Rays 17,200 17,200 2
Subtotal: 427,216 58,216 4
Music CDs 58 6 3
Data CDs 3 3 2
Optical
DVDs 22 22 100
Subtotal: 83 31 70
Camcorder Tape 300,000 300,000 5
PC Disk Drives 766,000 7,660 100
Magnetic Departmental Servers 460,000 161,000 100
Enterprise Servers 167,000 109,000 100
Subtotal: 1,693,000 635,660 55
TOTAL: 2,120,539 693,930 50

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Executive Summary
Three striking facts emerge from these estimates. The first is the "paucity of print." Printed material
of all kinds makes up less than .003 percent of the total storage of information. This doesn't imply
that print is insignificant. Quite the contrary: it simply means that the written word is an extremely
efficient way to convey information.
The second striking fact is the ``democratization of data.'' A vast amount of unique information is
created and stored by individuals. Original documents created by office workers are more than 80%
of all original paper documents, while photographs and X-rays together are 99% of all original film
documents. Camcorder tapes are also a significant fraction of total magnetic tape storage of unique
content, with digital tapes being used primarily for backup copies of material on magnetic drives.

As for hard drives, roughly 55% of the total are installed in single-user desktop computers. Of
course, much of the content on individual user's hard drives is not unique, which accounts for the
large difference between the upper and lower bounds for magnetic storage. However, as more and
more image data moves onto hard drives, we expect to see the amount of digital content produced
by individuals stored on hard drives increase dramatically.

This democratization of data is quite remarkable. A century ago the average person could only
create and access a small amount of information. Now, ordinary people not only have access to
huge amounts of data, but are also able to create gigabytes of data themselves and, potentially,
publish it to the world via the Internet, if they choose to do so.

The third interesting finding is the "dominance of digital" content. Not only is digital information
production the largest in total, it is also the most rapidly growing. While unique content on print and
film are hardly growing at all, optical and digital magnetic storage shipments are doubling each year.
Even today, most textual information is "born digital,'' and within a few years this will be true for
images as well. Digital information is inexpensive to copy and distribute, is searchable, and is
malleable. Thus the trend towards democratization of data---especially in digital form---is likely to
continue.

Qualifications

It goes without saying that the numbers in Table 1 can only be taken as rough estimates. We have
had to make various assumptions in order to construct our these figures, and some data sources are
contradictory or simply not available. Here we list some of the most serious methodological
qualifications, each of which offers interesting challenges for those who would seek to refine these
estimates.

Duplication.

It is very difficult to distinguish "copies" from "original" information. A newspaper, for example,
is published on paper, often published on the Web as well, and is generally archived on
microfilm. In fact, most printed materials are produced and/or archived magnetically. There is
also lot of duplication within each medium: many newspapers reproduce stock prices, wire
stories, advertisements and so on. Ideally, we would like to measure the storage required for
the unique content in the newspaper, but it is very hard to measure that number. As indicated
above, the duplication issue is particularly serious for digital storage, since little of what is
stored on individual hard drives is unique. We've tried to adjust for this the best we can, and
documented our assumptions in the detailed treatment of each medium.

Compression.

Unlike print or film, there is no unambiguous way to measure the size of digital information. A
600 dot per inch scanned digital image of text can be compressed to about one hundredth of
its original size. A DVD version of a movie can be 1000 times smaller than the original digital
image. We've made what we thought were sensible choices with respect to compression,
steering a middle course between the high estimate (based on ``reasonable'' compression)
and the low estimate (based on highly compressed content). It is worth noting that the fact
that digital storage can be compressed to different degrees depending on needs is a

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significant advantage for digital over analog storage.

Archival Media.

Should information stored as "backup" be included in the total? This question arises for
microfilm, rewritable CD ROMS, and even with print, but digital magnetic tape is the most
difficult case. Tape's most common use is to archive material on hard drives and therefore
should not count towards the stock of ``original information'' produced each year. Industry
rules of thumb suggest that there is about 10 times as much storage on tape as on hard
drives. This fraction has been falling as more and more data is stored on arrays of hard
drives, which are much more convenient to use. We've omitted most tape storage for this
reason. However, we should also note that vast quantities of original scientific data are stored
in tape libraries; we describe a few such repositories in the detailed treatment of magnetic
storage.

World and US production.

The US produces about 25% of all textual information and about 30% of the photographic
information, a significant fraction of the world's total. We don't have good data on magnetic
storage, but it seems plausible that the US produces at least half of the content stored on
magnetic media. We've used numbers for world production when available, but in some cases
have had to extrapolate from US production. Little data is available about information
production in the Third World.

Growth rates.

The production of unique content in books, photos, and CDs is barely growing. DVD content is
growing rapidly, but that's because it is a new medium and a significant amount of legacy
content is being converted. By contrast, shipments of digital magnetic storage are essentially
doubling every year.

TV and Radio.

Original TV content produced each year is generally stored on magnetic camcorder tapes,
and so is counted in that category of storage media. Much radio content is simply broadcast
music, which we have already captured with the CD statistics. See Table 3 for information on
how much storage it would take to back up all TV and radio broadcasts, with minimal
adjustment for duplication.

Digital Communication

Our project is primarily concerned with content that is stored, either by institutions or by individuals.
But there is a lot of material that is communicated, without being systematically stored. Some of this
material is born digital, such as email, Usenet, and the Web. Some of it is non-digital, such as
telephone calls and letters.

We expect that digital communications will be systematically archived in the near future, and thus will
contribute to the demand for storage. Table 2 shows how much storage would be required to archive
the major forms of digital communication.

Table 2: Summary of yearly unique computer-mediated information flows.

Content Terabytes
Email 11,285
Usenet 73

In 2000 the World Wide Web consisted of about 21 terabytes of static HTML pages, and is growing
at a rate of 100% per year. Many Web pages are generated on-the-fly from data in databases, so the

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Executive Summary

total size of the "deep Web" is considerably larger.

Although the social impact of the Web has been phenomenal, about 500 times as much email is
being produced per year as the stock of Web pages. It appears that about 610 billion emails are sent
per year, compared to 2.1 billion static Web pages. Even the yearly flow of Usenet news is more
than 3 times the stock of Web pages. As Odlyzko (2000) puts it, "communication, not content, is the
killer app."

Non-digital Communication

We also estimated the storage requirements if one attempted to archive all the non-digital
communication flows in the United States. We consider only the US since we didn't have very good
data for worldwide communication. The results are shown in Table 3.

Table 3: Summary of yearly non-digital communication flows in the United

States 1999.
Content Terabytes
Radio 788
TV 14,150
Telephone 576,000
Postal 150,000

The striking thing here is the volume of voice telephone traffic, most of which is presumably unique
content. Radio and TV, by contrast, have a huge amount of duplication from station to station, since
many of the broadcasts are reusing the same content.

Consumption of Information

Though the main focus of our report is on the supply of information, it is interesting to look at data
measuring the consumption of information as well. Table 4 depicts hours per year of time spent on
various media in US households in 1992 and in 2000. We do not have good data on information use
in the workplace.

Table 4: Summary of yearly media use by US households in hours per year,

with estimated megabyte equivalent. (Hours from Statistical Abstract of the
United States, 1999, Table 920, (projected)).
Item 1992 Hours 2000 Hours 2000 % Change
MBytes
TV 1510 1571 3,142,000 4
Radio 1150 1056 57,800 -8
Recorded Music 233 269 13,450 15
Newspaper 172 154 11 -10
Books 100 96 7 -4
Magazines 85 80 6 -6
Home video 42 55 110,000 30
Video games 19 43 21,500 126

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Internet 2 43 9 2,050
Total: 3,324 3,380 3,344,783 1.7

The notable features of this table are 1) the hours spent on TV and radio consumption and their
consistency over time; 2) the reduction in time spent on printed information; and, 3) the dramatic
increase in home video, video games, and Internet usage. However, it is important to note that the
latter three categories are still very small in terms of total hours.

It is also noteworthy that total time spent in media access has hardly changed in eight years. Even
while information supply is growing dramatically (especially in electronic media) the actual
consumption of information is barely changing: a smaller and smaller fraction of what is produced is
actually consumed, on average, a trend noted by Pool (1984). Census data indicate that over 40% of
the US population has access to the Internet, so this trend is likely to increase.

Individual and Published Information

We remarked above that technological advances have allowed for a "democratization of data:"
individuals can now generate a huge amount of information on their own. Table 5 summarizes the
yearly production of information by and about individuals.

Table 5: Yearly production of individual information

Item Amount Terabytes
Photographs 80 billion images 410,000
Home videos 1.4 billion tapes 300,000
X-rays 2 billion images 17,200
Hard disks 200 million installed drives 13,760
Total: 740,960

The production of individual information can be compared to the amount of "published" information in
Table 6. Note that the amount of "individual" information is over 600 times larger as the amount of
published information.

Although the Web, Usenet, and email include a great deal of individual information, they have been
omitted from both of these tables, since it is difficult to know whether to classify this material as
"individual" or "public." In the future we expect the distinction between "individual" and "public" to
become increasingly blurred.

Table 6: Yearly production of published information

Item Titles Terabytes
Books 968,735 8
Newspapers 22,643 25
Journals 40,000 2
Magazines 80,000 10
Newsletters 40,000 .2
Office Documents 7,500,000,000 195
Cinema 4,000 16

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Music CDs 90,000 6

Data CDs 1,000 3
DVD-video 5,000 22
Total: 285

Conclusion

The world's total production of information amounts to about 250 megabytes for each man, woman,
and child on earth. It is clear that we are all drowing in a sea of information. The challenge is to learn
to swim in that sea, rather than drown in it. Better understanding and better tools are desperately
needed if we are to take full advantage of the ever-increasing supply of information described in this
report.

About this Report

Financial support for this study was provided by EMC. We view this report as a "living document"
and intend to revise it based on comments, corrections, and suggestions. Please send such
materials to [email protected].

About the School of Information Management and Systems

UC Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems is the first school in the nation to
explicitly address the growing need to manage information more effectively.

With respect to education, we are training a new type of professional: "information managers". Our
graduates are familiar with the latest and most powerful techniques for locating, organizing,
retrieving, manipulating, protecting, and presenting information. They study not only technology, but
also the institutional, legal, economic and organizational factors necessary for creating information
systems that meet peoples' needs.
With respect to research, we are examining ways to build more effective tools and systems for
managing information. This effort is inherently multidisciplinary, involving computer science,
information science, social science, cognitive science, and legal studies.

Appendices
■ A. Powers of Ten
The Powers of Ten table is helpful in illustrating the relative size of gigabytes, terabytes,
petabytes and the like.

■ B. Upper and lower estimates

The upper estimate is a reasonably "hard" number; based on published data. The lower
estimate is an attempt to adjust for duplication and compression. Here is a quick summary of
some of those adjustments.

❍ Paper.
There is some duplication with ISBN numbers due to paperback, hardback, different
editions, etc. There is duplication with financial papers, ads, and so on in newspapers.
We used CPC compression, which captures images; conversion to ASCII eliminates
images, but compresses text dramatically.

❍ Film.
If we used JPEG compression, rather than PhotoCD, we get a much smaller number

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for the storage requirements for images.

❍ Music CDs.
If we use MP3 compression we get a much smaller number for the storage
requirements of audio files.

❍ Magnetic.
We assume that about 20 percent of magnetic storage is unique.

■ C. Reading the data

The left-side navigation and Site Map provide links to summary reports on each medium. The
summaries provide links to detailed reports and spreadsheets containing the raw data.

Within each media type, we have distinguished between originals and copies, and between
the yearly flow of production and the accumulated stock. We've also described growth rates
and compression issues for each medium.

■ D. Acknowledgements
Gray and Shenoy (2000) provides useful information on trends in magnetic storage. Lesk
(1997) conducted an earlier study that attempted to estimate the total stock of information.
Pool (1984) examined the flow of information in the US circa 1980. See the individual
acknowledgements for the names of people who helped us.

Bibliography
■ Jim Gray and Prashant Shenoy.
Rules of thumb in data engineering.
in Proceedings of 16th International Conference on Data Engineering, pages 3-12. IEEE,
2000.
http://www.research.microsoft.com/~Gray/.

■ Michael Lesk.
How much information is there in the world?
Technical report, lesk.com, 1997.
http://www.lesk.com/mlesk/ksg97/ksg.html.

■ Andrew Odlyzko.
Content is not king.
Technical report, AT&T Labs, 2000.
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■ Ithiel De Sola Pool, Hiroshi Inose, Nozomu Takasaki, Roger Hurwitz.

Communications flows : a census in the United States and Japan.
Elsevier Science, New York, 1984.

■ Ithiel De Sola Pool. "Tracking the Flow of Information".

Science (12 August), 1983, 221:4611, 609-613.

■ U.S. Census Bureau.

Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1999
Washington, D.C., 1999.
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© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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■ Originals
● Flow
❍ World
❍ United States
❍ Notes on Conversion Assumptions
● Stock
❍ World
❍ United States
● Rate of Change
■ Copies
● Flow
❍ World
❍ United States
● Stock
● Rate of Change
■ References
■ Charts
■ More Discussion

Originals

Flow

Approximately 240 terabytes (compressed) of unique data are recorded on printed media
worldwide each year, as shown in the following table:

Table 1: World Flow

Media Type Unique Items Conversion Factor Total
(Sources and Year per Year Terabytes
Cited)* (Annual
Worldwide)

Scanned image (600 dpi): 40 39

MB/book
Books
968,735
(UNESCO 1996) Digital compression: 8 MB/book 8
Plain text: 1 MB/book 1

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Scanned image (600 dpi): 5,475 124

MB/year
Newspapers
22,643
(ISSN 1999) Digital compression: 1095 MB/year 25
Plain text: 110 MB/year 2.5
Scanned image (600 dpi): 225 9
Scholarly MB/year
journals 40,000
(Ulrich's 2000) Digital compression: 45 MB/year 2
Plain text: 4 MB/year .2
Scanned image (600 dpi): 650 52
Mass-market MB/year
periodicals 80,000
(Ulrich's 2000) Digital compression: 130 MB/year 10
Plain text: 13 MB 1
Scanned image (600 dpi): 20 .8
Newsletters MB/item
(Oxbridge 40,000
Directory 1997) Digital compression: 4 MB/item .2
Plain text: .4 MB/item .02
Archivable, Scanned image (600 dpi): 130 975
original office KB/page
documents 7.5 X 109 pages
(National Digital compression: 26 KB/page 195
Archives 1998) Plain text: 2.5 KB/page 19
Scanned:
1200 TB
Totals: Compressed:
240 TB
Text: 24 TB
* Detailed source information listed at end of this document.

Table 2: United States Flow

Media Type Unique Items Conversion Factor Total
(Sources and Year per Year Terabytes
Cited)* (Annual
Worldwide)

Scanned image (600 dpi): 40 3

Books (US MB/book
Statistical 64,711
Abstract 1999) Digital compression: 8 MB/book .5
Plain text: 1 MB/book .05
Scanned image (600 dpi): 5,475 13
Newspapers
MB/year
(Newspaper
2,386
Association of Digital compression: 1095 MB/year 3
America)
Plain text: 110 MB/year .3
Scanned image (600 dpi): 225 2
Scholarly
MB/year
journals
10,500

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(Tenopir and Digital compression: 45 MB/year .5
King)
Plain text: 4 MB/year .04
Scanned image (600 dpi): 650 13
Mass-market MB/year
periodicals 20,000
(Ulrich's 2000) Digital compression: 130 MB/year 2.6
Plain text: 13 MB .26
Scanned image (600 dpi): 20 .2
MB/item
Newsletters
10,000
(NEPA) Digital compression: 4 MB/item .04
Plain text: .4 MB/item .004
Archivable, Scanned image (600 dpi): 130 390
original office KB/page
documents 3 X 109 pages
(National Digital compression: 26 KB/page 78
Archives 1998) Plain text: 2.5 KB/page 7.5
Scanned:
421 TB
Totals: Compressed:
84 TB
Text: 8.2 TB
* Detailed source information listed at end of this document.

Notes on Conversion Assumptions

Books. Estimate 300 pages per book. (Source: Robert M. Hayes, UCLA, "The Economics of Digital
Libraries" www.usp.br/sibi/economics.html)

Newspapers. Estimate 30 pages per newspaper, then multiply by 365 days per year. (The page
number is low, to reflect the number of small and non-daily newspapers published around the
world.)

Scholarly Journals. Estimate 1,700 pages per periodical per year. (Source: Donald W. KLing and
Carol Tenopir. "Economic Cost Models of Scientific Scholarly Journals," 1998.
www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/icsu/kingppr.htm)

Mass Market Periodicals. Estimate 5,000 pages per periodical per year. (Source: Robert M.
Hayes, UCLA, "The Economics of Digital Libraries" www.usp.br/sibi/economics.html)

Newsletters. Estimate 150 pages per newsletter per year. (Source: Oxbridge Directory of
Newsletters - 1997)

Office documents. The estimate above is limited to documents that an organization might retain
permanently such as documents comparable to those retained by the National Archives in
Washington D.C., which estimates that they retain 2% of US government documents produced each
year.

More detail on the conversion factors used for the above estimates appears in the Print Detail
Report.

Stock

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United States

According to a press release from January 2000, booksinprint.com 2000 includes 3.2 million titles -
about 26 TB total. This figure is supported by online booksellers such as Amazon.com and
Barnes&Noble.com who claim to offer access to 3 to 4 million titles.

If one wished to more fully address the universe of book titles in the United States, including those
that are no longer in print, one could look to the holdings of the larger national libraries and
copyright repositories - for example, the Library of Congress print media collection includes almost
26 million books (208 terabytes).

World

To estimate the international stock of books currently available for purchase, we extrapolate from
the United States production figures. The US engages in the world's largest trade in printed
products, producing about 40% of the world's printed material, according to the US Industry and
Trade Outlook 2000. The world stock of original titles might be about 8 million titles - equivalent to
64 TB.

Using the same 40% rule of thumb, we can also estimate the worldwide stock of books (including
those out of print). The national library and copyright repository of the United States - the Library of
Congress - contains about 26 million books. Therefore, the world stock of books might be
approximately 65 million titles.

Rate of change

The number of titles within most print media forms have increased each year worldwide - between 2
and 10%. Within the US, the number of book titles increased every year until 1996, when there was
a 5% downturn.

Copies

Flow

If all of the writing paper and newsprint produced each year were used to store printed information,
this would be equivalent to about 980,000 terabytes worldwide.

World

As of 1997, the world was producing 90 million metric tons of printing and writing paper and 36
million metric tons of newspaper. In equivalent bytes, this translates to 540,000 TB (world) for
printing and writing paper, and 432,000 TB for newsprint.

The number of books sold worldwide may be estimated using the 40% rule of thumb (cited above)
and the US book sales statistics (cited below): about 2.75 billion books, equivalent to 22,000 TB.

United States

The US produces about 30% of the world's paper and paperboard output (Source: US Industry &
Trade Outlook 2000). In 1999, the US produced 23.8 million metric tons of printing and writing paper
and 6.4 million metric tons of newsprint. In bytes, this translates to 142,800 TB for printing and
writing paper and 76,800 TB for newsprint. These figures provide an upper bound on the total
number of bytes required to digitally store all the information produced in printed format each year.

About 1.1 billion books were sold in the United States in 1999. Using the 8 MB/book estimate, this
is equivalent to 8,800 TB. (Source: Wall Street Journal, July 17, 2000, "A New Chapter:
Independent Booksellers Hope to Find Strength in Numbers" by Scott Eden.)

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In the United States 55,979,332 daily newspapers and 59,894,381 Sunday newspapers circulate
each year. (Source: Newspaper Association of America, citing Editor and Publisher.)

The total number of US magazines circulated annually exceeds 500 million. (Source: US Industry
and Trade Outlook.)

Each year, almost 500 billion copies are produced on copiers in the US; nearly 15 trillion copies
are produced on copiers, printers, and multi-function machines. (Source: XeroxParc). For specific
information on fax printing, see the Telecommunications Summary.

Stock

According to the 1999 US Industry and Trade Outlook, the United States produces more printed
products than any other country in the world. NAFTA countries have a 50% world market share.
Estimating that the US produces 40% of the world's printed materials, we can estimate that each
year the world produces 7.5 billion archiveable pages, which would be equivalent to 195
terabytes (compressed). (Source: National Archives and Records Administration.)
Rate of Change

As with the other print industries, growth in paper production is expected to be incremental but fairly
consistent, both within the United States and internationally. Globally, paper and paperboard
production capacity is forecast to grow from 333.6 million metric tons in 1998 to 348.1 million metric
tons in 2001, an increase of 14.5 million metric tons (about 4%) over those three years. (Source:
U.S. Industry and Trade Outlook, 2000).

According to the American Forest and Paper Association, US capacity to produce paper will
increase by an average of only 0.7% annually over the next three years (2000-2002).

References

■ Bogart, Dave, ed. The Bowker Annual Library and Book Trade Almanac, 44th edition. New
Jersey: R.R. Bowker, 1999.
■ Cummings, Anthony M., Marcia L. Witte, William G. Bowen, and Laura O. Lazarus. University
Libraries and Scholarly Communication: A Study Prepared for the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation. The Association of Research Libraries, 1992
■ Hayes, Robert M., UCLA School of Information Science, "The Economics of Digital Libraries"
■ King, Donald W. and Carol Tenopir. "Economic Cost Models of Scientific Scholarly Journals,"
1998.
■ American Forest and Paper Association, 1999 Statistics for Paper, Paperboard and Wood
Pulp. Washington, DC, 1999. To order a copy, see www.afandpa.org/about/about.html or call
(800) 244-3090.
■ Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1999.
■ ArchiveBuilders.com White Paper, "Computer Storage Requirements for Various Digitized
Document Types"
■ Association of Research Libraries Statistics
■ Books in Print, 1999-2000. New Jersey: R.R. Bowker, 1999.
■ International Standard Serial Number Register
■ International Standard Book Number Register
■ JSTOR digital library
■ Magazine Publishers of America, Information Center, (212) 872-3745.
■ National Directory of Magazines.

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■ Newsletter and Electronic Publisher's Association (NEPA)
■ Newspaper Association of America, Facts About Newspapers.
■ Newspaper Project, National Endowment for the Humanities.
■ Oxbridge Directory of Newsletters 1997. New York: Oxbridge Communications, Inc., 1997.
■ Ulrich's International Periodical Directory. New York: Bowker Publishing, 2000.
■ UNESCO Statistical Yearbook 1999. Paris, UNESCO, 1999.
■ U.S. Census Department, 1999 Statistical Abstract of the United States
■ U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics
■ U.S. Government Printing Office, Prepared Statement before the Committee on Rules and
Administration, U.S. Senate on Public Access to Government Information in the 21st Century
July 1996.
■ U.S. Industry and Trade Outlook. Available in print from McGraw Hill/U.S Department of
Commerce Washington, D.C. or download from www.ntis.gov/products
■ Chaskas, Eric. US National Archives and Records Administration.
■ Walden's Paper Report. Twice-monthly newsletter, published by Walden-Mott Corporation,
Ramsey, NJ. Available by subscription only. See
www.walden-mott.com/PaperReport/PAP_RPT.HTM or call (201) 818-8630.

Charts

Click here to see charts supporting the above estimates, with time-series data.

More Discussion

Click here to read additional discussion of the conversion factors and related issues and to obtain
detailed bibliographical information.

© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Film

■ Originals
● Flow
❍ Photographs
❍ Motion Pictures
❍ X-Rays
● Stock
❍ Photographs
❍ Motion Pictures
❍ X-Rays
■ Copies
● Flow
❍ Photographs
❍ Motion Pictures
❍ X-Rays
● Stock
❍ Photographs
❍ Motion Pictures
❍ X-Rays
■ References
■ More Details

Originals

Flow

Photographs

There are over 2700 photographs taken every second around the world, adding up to well over 80
billion new images a year taken on over 3 billion rolls of film, according to estimates published by
the United States Department of Commerce.

Photo CD, a format for digitized photography introduced by Kodak in 1992, has been widely
adopted both by professional and amateur photographers. Kodak reports that the typical photograph
can be digitized in this format in 5 megabytes without loss of picture quality. Utilizing this conversion
factor, then, the world's 82 billion photos store 410 petabytes of data every year in photographs.

Motion Pictures

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Film
Apart from still photography, film is also used to store moving pictures. In the years from 1990 to
1995, UNESCO reports that there were 4,250 films produced annually throughout the world. The
Motion Picture Association of America reports that for the year 1998, its members released 221
movies (compared to 219 in 1997), while releases by all U.S. companies, including independent film
companies, rose from 461 in 1997 to 490 in 1998.

It takes approximately 2 gigabytes to store an hour of motion picture images in digital form using the
MPEG-2 compression standard. If the images in 4500 full length movies were converted into bits,
the world's annual original cinematic production would, therefore, consume about 16 terabytes.

X-Ray Film

The other major use for film is the storage of x-ray images for medical, dental and industrial
purposes. Approximately 2 billion radiographs are taken around the world each year, including chest
x-rays, mammograms, CT scans, and so on. (Traditionally, 8% of x-ray film is used in dentistry and
industrial applications.) When x-ray films are converted to digital format, it is important that there is
no important clinical information lost. The University of Pittsburgh Clinical Multimedia Laboratory
suggests that an average conversion of a chest x-ray to digital storage with lossless compression
will require 8 megabytes. To store all the world's x-rays to a computer file of this size would,
therefore, require 17 petabytes each year.

Table 1: Original Data On Film Annually Worldwide

Units Digital Conversion Total
Petabytes
Photography 82,000,000,000 5 mb per photo 410
Motion Pictures 4,000 4 gb per movie 0.016
X-Rays 2,160,000,000 8 mb per radiograph 17.2
All Film Total: 427.216

Stock

Photographs

The number of original photographs stored around the world is not a widely reported topic. There
are commercial firms that collect professional photographs for resale and the largest of these report
collections in the tens of millions. For example, Getty Images reports holding 70 million images
mostly on silver halide film and its principal rival, Corbis Images, claims 65 million images.

As for amateur photographs, in 1997 it was estimated that there were 150 billion photographs stored
in the United States. This is approximately 8 to 10 years production of photographs as of that time.
Assuming that similar storage rates apply worldwide, it is likely that on the order of 750 billion
photographs now exist. Using the same PhotoCD estimate of 5 megabytes per photo, there are 3.5
exabytes of original photographic data.

Motion Pictures

The number of motion pictures made around the world from 1895 to 1990 was approximately
242,000. The International Film Index, 1895-1990, lists entries of that many titles of films. (There is
no guarantee that some of these movies still exist, however.) The overall total is broken down into
these categories of film types:

Table 2: Film Breakdown by Type

Type Number

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Film

FEATURE 110,586
SHORT 50,056
ANIMATED 9,787
DOCUMENTARY 7,277
TELEVISION 4,197
SERIAL 553
SILENT 59,680
TOTAL 242,136

The "Television" category refers to films that were originally made for television broadcast rather
than theatrical release. "Serials" are films made primarily in the United States between 1914-1936
and were made to be shown in weekly installments.

As discussed in the precedng section, in the decade since 1990, there have been around 4500
movies made each year, adding another 45,000 to the total world stock of original motion pictures.
Accordingly, a good estimate of the world's original pictures is approximately 300,000.

X-Rays

The clinical and legal uses of medical x-rays continue for an indefinite time and, therefore, prudent
practice is to preserve x-rays and medical records generally for as long as possible. The same
principle applies to dental x-rays. The only use of x-ray that may result in regular destruction of the
resulting images is industrial testing, but even there it is likely that images are retained for a
substantial period of time. Therefore, it is believed that there is little systematic destruction of the
flow of new x-rays and virtually all of them are added to the stock. For the sake of calculation, it is
assumed that a full ten years of x-ray images will constitute the stock. This is equivalent to
approximately 21.6 billion images or 172.8 petabytes.

Copies

Flow

Photographs

There has been very little history of the large mass of photographs being copied. Kodak estimates
that only about 2 percent of photographs are ever copied or modified in any way after they are
originally developed. Of course, some photographic images are widely distributed in newspapers
and magazines. But these represent a miniscule fraction even of the professional photographer's
work, itself a small minority of all photographs.

One copy of 2 percent of the annual new photographs would be 1.6 billion photographic copies.
With PhotoCD compression, this would represent 8 petabytes per year of photographic copies.

Motion Pictures

The Wolfman Report on the Photographic and Imaging Industry in the United States states that the
average number of prints per original motion picture is 700. The Silver Institute, however, reports
that 6000 release prints are made for each feature movie. A figure of 1000 copies for motion
pictures will be used on the assumption that many of the world's motion pictures have more limited
releases than the typical Hollywood blockbuster. American studios only account for 400 to 500
movies per year. 45,000 copies of motion pictures per year at 4 gigabytes per copy is 18 petabytes
of copies.

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X-Rays

The clinical requirements for medical x-rays demand that originals be used in almost any situation.
There is no siginificant use of copies of x-rays at all.

Stock

Photographs

The stock of copies of photographs can be calculated by reference to the assumptions made for the
storage of the originals. Ten years of copies of photographs would be 16 billion. If these were all
digitized at the rate of 5 megabytes per picture, there are 80 petabytes of photographic copies on
hand.

Motion Picture

The copies on film of motion pictures made for distribution are short-lived. Most of these copies are
deliberately destroyed when the general theatrical release of the movie is over. If even ten of these
survive for the approximately 4,000 motion pictures made annually for the last twenty-five years, this
would be equivalent to about 1,000,000 copies. If each copy is equivalent to 4 gigabytes of data,
this stock of copies of motion picture film is 4 petabytes.

X-Rays

There is no significant stock of copies of x-rays.

References

■ United States Industrial and Trade Outlook 2000

■UNESCO Statistical Yearbook
■ 1999 Photo Marketing Association

■ Silver Institute

More Details About Film

© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Optical

■ Originals
● Flow
❍ World
❍ United States
● Stock
● Rate of Change
■ Copies
● Flow
● Stock
■ Optical Media Bibliography
■ Charts
■ More Discussion

Originals

For optical media, we focused on the three major industry categories: CD audio, CD-ROM, and
DVD.

Flow

Annual world title production of the 3 media types appears in the following chart. (All figures are
rounded to the nearest hundred or terabyte.)

Table 1: Annual world title production of the 3 media types.

Media Unique Unique Conversion Factor Total Total
Type Items per Items per Terabytes Terabytes
(Source* & Year (US) Year (Annual US) (Annual
Year Cited) Worldwide)
(World)
Uncompressed: .650
22 58
CD - Music GB/item
33,100 90,000
(1998) Compressed (to
2 6
MP3): .065 GB/item
Uncompressed (to
1 3
CD- ROM MP3): .650 GB/item
500 1,000
(1999) Compressed: .065
.3 .6
GB/item
DVD-video
3,000 5,000 4.38 GB/item 13 22
(1999)

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Optical

Uncompressed 36 83
Totals:
Compressed 15.3 29
*Detailed source information listed at end of this document.

World

To estimate how many CD-audio originals are created each year worldwide, we used RIAA statistics
regarding the US market share and US record releases (see below). The United States holds a 37%
share of the world music market and releases about 33,100 items per year. Therefore, the world
produces roughly 90,000 originals per year, equivalent to 58 TB (uncompressed).

Between 1998 and 1999, 1,000 new CD-ROM data titles were added to CD-ROMs in Print, an
international directory published by Gale Research. This equals about 3 TB of new information in
one year (uncompressed).

The United States currently produces about 60% of the DVD titles available worldwide. Using US
title production statistics, we estimate that about 5,000 new DVD titles are produced internationally
each year - this is about 22 TB. (Source: Jim Taylor's DVD FAQ).

United States

The US produces approximately 37% of the world's CD-audio titles, 50% of the world's CD-ROM
titles and 60% of the world's DVD titles. (Sources: Recording Industry Association of America,
International Recording Media Association, and Jim Taylor's DVD FAQ).

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) reports the number of new releases and
album re-releases each year. In 1998, 33,100 titles were released, roughly equivalent to 22 TB.

The US share of the CD-ROM replication market is 52%, according to the International Recording
Media Association. If we assume that the US holds a similar share of CD-ROM title production, then
about 500 titles are produced by the United States each year, equivalent to about 1 TB per year.

For the past three years, new DVD titles have been added at a rate of about 3,000 per year (13 TB
per year) --a tremendous rate of content growth, but that's because it is a new medium and a
significant amount of legacy content is being converted. This rate should decrease as the medium
becomes more well-established. (Source: DVD Entertainment Group)

Stock

The All Music Guide (a comprehensive database tool used by industry leaders) reports a total of
523,363 titles (445,735 popular music and 77,628 classical music albums). If each work were
stored on a 650 MB CD, this would be equivalent to 340 TB. We can assume that this figure
represents the US portion of original works, then extrapolate the world stock to be about 1,400,000
titles. [???]

According to the 1999 edition of CD-ROMs in Print, internationally there are about 16,200 unique
CD-ROM titles (about 11 TB)--business applications (such as word processing and spreadsheet
packages), games, reference tools, and instructional programs. This figure is consistent with other
CD-ROM directories, such as the Multimedia & CD-ROM Directory, which lists 17,000 titles.

The United States produces about two-thirds of the total DVD titles. As of June 2000, there are
about 8,500 titles available in the United States, 13,000 worldwide. This is equivalent to 37 TB (US)
and 57 TB (world).

Rate of Change

Production of CD-Audio and CD-ROM originals is not increasing dramatically. However, the
production of DVD originals is growing at a tremendous rate (about 100% per year), due to the fact
that material previously available in another format is being reissued on DVD.

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Copies

Flow

Replication

In 1999, there were about 4.7 million audio CDs and 3.6 million CD-ROMs replicated worldwide,
according to the International Recording Media Association (IRMA). In addition, in 1999 194 million
DVD-Video units, 12 million DVD-ROM units, and 2 million DVD-Audio units were replicated.

A total of 1.583 billion recordable CDs (CD-Rs) were sold around the world in 1999, according to
Santa Clara Consulting Group. (Source: News Release, "Record sales drive Memorex up to third in
world CD market" www.lewisvpr.com/Releases/UKReleases/000620_memorex.html) Estimates of
growth in demand for CD-R vary--one consulting firm projects global demand to reach 4.74 billion in
the year 2000, while others project demand to be between 2.5 and 3 billion units. (Photonics
Industry & Technology Development Association, cited in www.taiwanheadlines.gov)

Retail

During 1999, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), 938.9 million
CDs were shipped to retail by U.S. producers. The US has a 37% share of the world's sales,
according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). Therefore, one can
extrapolate that CD shipments worldwide are about 2,500 million units. This is equivalent to 1,625
TB.

According to the DVD Entertainment Group, more than 130 million DVD video movies and music
video titles were shipped to retail between spring 1997 (when the format launched) and January
2000. 100 million discs were shipped during 1999 alone.

Stock

The stock of audio CDs in the United States can be estimated by summing the CD unit sales since
the format became popular. The RIAA only provides statistics going back to 1990 - these 10 years
of shipments add up to 6,200 million units, equivalent to about 4,030 TB. Ten years of worldwide
shipments are approximately 15.2 billion units, equivalent to 10,937 TB.

Since the format was launched in 1997, more than 1.5 billion DVDs have been replicated
worldwide, almost 1 billion in North America alone.

Optical Media Bibliography

● All Music Guide

● The CD Information Center
● CD-ROMs in Print, 13th Edition: An International Guide to CD-ROM, CD-I, 3DO, MMCD,
CD32, Multimedia, Laserdisc, and Electronic Products. New York: The Gale Group, 1999.
● CD-ROM Finder: The World of CD-ROM Products for Information Seekers. Medford, NJ:
Learned Information, 1993
● The International Recording Media Association
● DVD Channel News
● DVD Entertainment Group
● DVD FAQ
● DVD Insider
● International Federation of the Phonographic Industry

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Optical
● Medialine
● Optical Storage Technology Association
● SUN CD-ROM FAQ

Charts

Click here to see charts supporting the above estimates, with time-series data.

More Discussion

Click here to read additional discussion of the conversion factors and related issues and to obtain
detailed bibliographical information.

© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Magnetic

■ Originals
● Flow
❍ Tape
❍ Disks
● Stock
❍ Tape
❍ Disks
■ Copies
● Flow
❍ Tape
❍ Disks
● Stock
❍ Tape
❍ Disks
■ More Details

Originals

Flow

Tape

Analog
Video

In the year 2000, 1.4 billion blank VHS video tapes will be produced for the entire world. If all of these
tapes were filled to their 120 minute capacity and then converted to digital using MPEG-2 compression,
there would be approximately 4 gigabytes of data per tape. One year's production of blank videotape,
therefore, provides storage space adequate for 5600 petabytes of data.

Assuming twenty percent [???] of this tape is used for the storage of original data, the flow of new data
stored on analog VHS videotape per year would be 1120 petabytes.

Video camcorder tapes (all formats except VHS) are produced at the rate of 150 million per year
according to the Japan Recording Media Industry Association. Almost all of this tape is used for the
storage of original data. Assuming one hour per tape in MPEG-2 format yields 300 petabytes.

Total original analog video production worldwide runs at about 1420 petabytes annually. [???]

Audio

In the year 2000, 921 million blank audio tape cassettes will be produced for the entire world according to
British research firm, Understanding & Solutions. If all of these tapes were filled to their 120 minute
capacity and then converted to digital using the common CD audio format, there would be approximately
1 gigabyte of data per tape. One year's production of blank audiotape, therefore, provides storage space
adequate for 921 petabytes of data.

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Assuming twenty percent [???] of this tape were used for the storage of original data, the flow of new
data stored on analog audiotape per year would be 184.2 petabytes.

Digital

There are 25 million computer tape drives installed in the world at present. These drives provide storage
capacity for all range of computers - from desktop personal computers to the most mammoth
supercomputers. Fred Moore estimates that the amount of data stored on tape is between 4 and 15
times the amount of enterprise data on disks and that there is about $1 billion per year of computer tape
media sold worldwide.

In order to estimate the amount of data stored on tape, we will first estimate the number of enterprise
storage systems and then multiply by 10. IDC estimates that 250 petabytes of RAID storage capacity will
be shipped worldwide in 2000. RAID storage systems are taken as most closely approximating the
storage capacity deployed to data-intensive corporate, government and scientific uses, the largest
consumers of magnetic tape backup.

A midrange estimate of the total amount of data stored on magnetic tape would, therefore, be 2.5
exabytes.

In all but the largest computer applications, however, tape is generally used solely for backup of data
already stored on hard disk drives. Quantum, the manufacturer of DLT tape, the most popular format for
enterprise storage, estimates that 90 percent of the tape capacity in that format is used for backup. Fred
Moore also points out that it is more and more common for multiple copies of data to now be stored on
tape.

If it is assumed that ten percent of the total amount of data stored on tape is original data of the sort
generated by scientific experiments in high-energy physics or by observational earth satellites or archival
storage on tape where the data is no longer stored on disk, original magnetic tape data is roughly the
same as all the RAID capacity shipped annually - 250 petabytes in the year 2000.

250 petabytes is also generally consistent with estimates derived by use of forecasts of producer
revenue of around $1 billion for tape media and an average cost of around $5 per gigabyte of tape
storage.
Disks
Floppy Disks

In the year 2000, 1 billion 3.5 inch floppy disks, each capable of storing 1.44 megabytes, will be
produced for the world. This is an aggregate storage capacity of 1.4 petabytes. If [???] five percent of
this is original data, new data per year on floppy disk would be 0.07 petabytes.

Removable Disks

In the year 2000, 88 million removable 100 megabyte disks and 25 million removable 1 gigabyte disks
will be produced for the world. Together, these two varieties of removable disks provide 33.8 petabytes
of storage capacity. If five [???] percent of this is original data, new data per year stored on removable
disks would be 1.69 petabytes.

Hard Disks

In the year 2000, hard disk drives capable of storing 2500 petabytes of data will be produced for the
world.

The amount of original data stored on hard disks is most likely to vary according to the computing
environment in which the disks are deployed. It is possible to divide all hard disk storage into three
categories:

1. Personal computer, laptop, or workstation. This type of computer is responsible for approximately
55% of the computer disk storage capacity currently shipped.
2. Departmental server. This class of computing environment is responsible for about 30% of the
overall storage market.
3. Enterprise server. These big computers account for about 15% of the hard disk storage.

As with all such broad categorizations, there may be quite a bit of blurring around the edges. However,

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Magnetic
consideration of these three different environments leads to the conclusion that the amount of original
data stored on the computers in each is probably substantially different.

Single user computers and the applications software usually found on them is not suited for the
production of large amounts of original data. A recent study (McKenzie, "Microsoft's 'Applications Barrier
to Entry': The Missing 70,000 Programs") found that most people used only a few applications other than
those found in the Microsoft Office application suite. These applications are usually text-based, such as
word processing or spreadsheets, and so require minimal storage space. Most personal computers now
sold come with hard disk storage capacity in the range of 10 gigabytes. 100 megabytes of original data
constitutes 1 percent of disk capacity, which is the estimate for this category of computer disk. [???]

Departmental servers would be commonly found in business, government, educational or other

organizational settings. These servers provide disk space for a group of users, who all contribute to the
production of organizational data. Aside from the databases and spreadsheets, there may be product
catalogs and other graphic intensive marketing material, PowerPoint presentations, and so on. An
estimate of the original data stored in these hard disks is 35%. [???]

Enterprise servers are the large-scale computing environments where "big iron" traditionally has reigned.
The applications here are corporate or governmental transaction processing on a large scale or the
generation of huge data sets from scientific research missions. The amount of original data stored on
these computers is estimated at around 65%. [???]
Table 1: Original Data Stored On Hard Disk By Computing Environment (1995-1999) [In Petabytes]
Original 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999
Data Total Original Total Original Total Original Total Original Total Original
Personal 1% 58 0.6 101 1 189 2 399 4 766 8
Departmental 35% 32 15 55 19 114 40 239 84 460 161
Enterprise 65% 16 8 27 17 41 27 86 56 167 109
Total: 105 23.6 183 37 344 69 724 144 1,393 278

Table 2: Original Data Stored On Hard Disk By Computing Environment (2000-2004) [In Petabytes]
Original 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004
Data Total Original Total Original Total Original Total Original Total Original
Personal 1% 1,405 14 2,553 26 4,466 45 7,165 72
Departmental 35% 843 295 1,532 536 2,680 938 4,299 1,505
Enterprise 65% 306 199 557 362 974 633 1,563 1,016
Total: 2,554 508 4,642 924 8,120 1,616 13,027 2,593
The amount of original data compared to the total amount of data stored on magnetic hard disks works
out to twenty percent over all the years under consideration. Accordingly, in the following table
summarizing the annual flow of original data in various media, 20% of all hard disks are assumed to
store original data, the actual amount will vary depending on the capacity of the hard drive itself.
Table 3: Original Data Flow Storage Estimates
Unique Items per Total Annual
Media Type Year Conversion Factor Petabytes (World)
1 gb per tape (CD
audio format - no
Blank Audio Tape (2000) 184,200,000 compression) 184.2
4 gb per tape
(MPEG-2
Blank Video Tape (2000) 355,000,000 compression) 1420
Computer Tape Drives (2000) 5,000,000 Varies 250
Floppy Disk (2000) 5,000,000 1.44 mb per disk 0.07
100 mb (low
4,400,000 capacity)

Removable Disks (2000) 1,250,000 1 gb (high capacity) 1.69

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Hard Disks (2000) 37,400,000 Varies 500

Stock of Originals

Tape

Analog
Video

[???] 10 billion video cassettes, both prerecorded and recorded at home, have been accumulated. This is
equivalent to about five years production of these tapes. One billion camcorder format tapes have also
been added over the same time. This would be equivalent to 3 billion hours of stored original video,
which if digitally encoded would produce a stock of about 6000 petabytes of original videotaped data.
[???]

Audio

The total stock of original audio content stored on tape may be estimated by assuming twenty [???]
percent of five years production of blank cassette tapes contains original content. This equals 1 billion
cassette tapes. The digital equivalent of this audio information is 1000 petabytes.
Digital
The stock of original data on magnetic tape may be approximated by adding the yearly flow of original
data over the course of the expected lifetime of the medium. Some unfortunate experiences with the loss
of computer data stored on magnetic tape has led to the practice of continuous migration of this data to
new media every five to ten years. This process leads to the reduction in the number of tape cartridges
that need to be managed as tape capacity inexorably rises as well as insuring modernization of the tape
format.

Therefore, the stock of original data on magnetic tape may be taken as five year's worth of original data
flow. [???]
Disks
Floppy Disks

Floppy disks useful life is estimated to be three years. The amount of original data stored on the 4.5
billion floppies produced over the course of the past three years is around 5 percent of the total data on
those disks, or 0.32 petabytes.

Removable Disks

The amount of original data stored on removable disks over the past three years is approximately 5
petabytes.

Hard Disks

Over the past three years, hard disk capacity of 4625 petabytes has been produced. If twenty [???]
percent of that capacity has been used to store original content, the stock in that format is now 925
petabytes.

Copies

Flow

Tape

Analog
Video

In the year 2000 1.8 billion prerecorded video tapes will be distributed worldwide according to the
International Recording Media Association. This entire production will be copies, principally of feature
films. If converted to digital using MPEG-2 compression, prerecorded videotape would consume 7,200
petabytes per year.

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If [???] 80 percent of the blank videotape distributed per year were used for copies, this would constitute
a digital equivalent of 4,480 petabytes.

The total yearly world production of copied data on analog videotape, therefore, is 11,680 petabytes.
[???]

Audio

In the year 1999, 125 million prerecorded audio cassette tapes were distributed in the United States
according to the Recording Industry Association of America. This entire production was copies,
principally of music. If converted to digital using audio CD format, and assuming about one hour of music
per tape, prerecorded audio tape would consume 62.5 petabytes per year.

If 80 percent [???] of the 921 million blank audiotapes distributed per year worldwide were used for
copies, this would constitute a digital equivalent of 737 petabytes.

The total yearly production of copied data on analog audiotape, therefore, is 800 petabytes.
Digital
If ninety percent of the computer tape distributed annually were used for copies, this would constitute
2.25 exabytes of copied data for the year 2000. The amount of data on tape, however, is calculated by
reference to the RAID storage capacity shipped, which has been rising rapidly. Similar trends will most
likely be seen in the amount of data stored on tape, particularly as it becomes more common to make
multiple tape copies of data.
Disks
Floppy Disks

If 95 [???] percent of the 1.4 petabytes of annual floppy disk storage were used for copies of data, this
would add 1.33 petabytes to the stock of digital data stored on floppy disks.

Removable Disks

If 95 [???] percent of the 33.8 petabytes of annual removable disk storage were used for copies of data,
this would add 32.1 petabytes to the stock of digital data stored on removable disks.

Hard Disks

If 80 [???] percent of the 2500 petabytes of annual hard disk storage were used for copies of data, this
would add 2000 petabytes to the stock of digital data stored on hard disks.
Stock of Copies

Tape

Analog
Video

Five years production of blank T-120 VHS videotapes is approximately 7 billion units. If 80 [???] percent
of this were used for storage of copied data, the total stock of such data in MPEG-2 conversion would be
2240 petabytes. Five years production of prerecorded videotapes is approximately 8 billion units. This is
the digital equivalent of 3200 petabytes. The total world stock of copied data on videotape is 5440
petabytes.

Audio

The world production of blank audiotape for the past five years is approximately 5 billion units. There has
also been sales of prerecorded audiotapes during that period of 6 billion units. Assuming that 80 [???]
percent of the blank audiotape has been used for the storage of copied data, the overall stock of copies
of audio data on tape is 4000 petabytes on blank tape and 6000 petabytes on prerecorded tape.
Therefore, there is a total stock of 10,000 petabytes of copies of audio data on magnetic tape.
Digital
Ninety percent of the data stored on tape is copies and tape is estimated to store 4 to 15 the amount of
enterprise data on hard disk. IDC estimates that approximately 400 petabytes of RAID have been
shipped in the past three years. If all data on tape is calculated as ten times that amount, or 4 exabytes,
and copies as 90 percent of that overall amount, copies of data on magnetic tape worldwide would be 3.6
exabytes.

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Magnetic
Disks
Floppy Disks

There have been 4.5 billion floppy disks produced in the last three years, creating a total storage
capacity of 6.5 petabytes. If 95 percent of that storage were used for copies, the total stock of copies on
floppy disk would be 6.1 petabytes.

Removable Disks

Over the past three years approximately 100 petabytes have been stored on removable disk. Assuming
that 95 [???] percent of that is backups and copies, the total stock of copied data in this media format is
95 petabytes.

Hard Disks

Over the past three years, hard disk capacity of 4625 petabytes has been produced. If eighty [???]
percent of that capacity has been used to store copies of data, the stock of copied data on hard disk is
3700 petabytes.
More Details

© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Internet

■ Introduction
■ World Wide Web
■ Email & Mailing Lists
■ Usenet
■ FTP
■ IRC, Messaging Services, Telnet, ...
■ References

The Internet is one of the youngest and fastest growing media in today's world. Internet growth is
still accelerating, which indicates that the Internet has not yet reached its highest expansion period
[1]. It should be noted, however, that while the Internet is a completely new kind of medium, by
separating it into a distinct category, we are allowing for a certain amount of double counting,
because all the Internet-based stock of information is already accounted for under "magnetic" or
"tape" categories. Furthermore, we should make clear the distinction between the stock and the flow
of information. While web sites and some portion of email messages are being stored and
accounted for under different storage categories, there are other "components" of what we know as
"Internet," such as Internet Relay Chat (IRC) or Telnet, which exist only as a flow of communication.
What makes the Internet extremely successful is that it is one of a handful of media (such as radio
and TV), where one unit of storage might generate terabytes of flow, as opposed to books and
newspapers, where one exemplar is usually read by one or two people, and the flow of information
is relatively low.

World Wide Web

There are two groups of Web content. One, which we would call the "surface" Web is what
everybody knows as the "Web," a group that consists of static, publicly available web pages, and
which is a relatively small portion of the entire Web. Another group is called the "deep" Web, and it
consists of specialized Web-accessible databases and dynamic web sites, which are not widely
known by "average" surfers, even though the information available on the "deep" Web is 400 to 550
times larger than the information on the "surface." [2]

The "surface" Web consists of approximately 2.5 billion documents [1 and 5], up from 1 billion pages
at the beginning of the year [3], with a rate of growth of 7.3 million pages per day [1]. Estimates of
the average "surface" page size vary in the range from 10 kbytes [1] per page to 20 kbytes per page
[4]. So, the total amount of information on the "surface" Web varies somewhere from 25 to 50
terabytes of information [HTML-included basis]. If we want to obtain a figure for textual information,
we would use a factor of 0.4 [4], which leads to an estimate of 10 to 20 terabytes of textual content.
At 7.3 billion new pages added every day, the rate of growth is [taking an average estimate] 0.1
terabytes of new information [HTML-included] per day.

If we take into account all web-accessible information, such as web-connected databases, dynamic
pages, intranet sites, etc., collectively known as "deep" Web, there are 550 billion web-connected
documents, with an average page size of 14 kbytes, and 95% of this information is publicly
accessible [2]. If we were to store this information in one place, we would need 7,500 terabytes of

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Internet
storage, which is 150 times more storage than we would need for the entire "surface" Web, even
taking the highest estimate of 50 terabytes. 56% of this information is the actual content [HTML
excluded], which gives us an estimate of 4,200 terabytes of high-quality data. Two of the largest
"deep" web sites - National Climatic Data Center and NASA databases - contain 585 terabytes of
information, which is 7.8% of the "deep" web. And 60 of the largest web sites contain 750 terabytes
of information, which is 10% of the "deep" web.

When we look at the distribution of the web sites, the most apparent trend is that English loses its
dominant position. Currently, only 50% of all Internet users are native English speakers, though
English web sites continue to dominate with approximately 78% of all web sites and 96% of
e-commerce web sites being in English [6]. It's hard to estimate what percentage of web sites have
their origins in the United States, because .com domains can be registered in virtually any country,
English-language web sites are often created in countries like Japan, and many international web
sites are hosted in the United States. 17 million out of 27.5 million domains registered worldwide are
.com, and 2 million are .uk, making Great Britain's domain the biggest country domain in the world
[7].

More Details

Email & Mailing Lists

Email has become one of the most widespread ways of communication in today's society. A
white-collar worker receives about 40 email messages in his office every day [8]. Aggregately,
based on different estimates, there will be from 610 billion [9] to 1100 billion [10] messages sent this
year alone. With the average size of an email message 18,500 bytes [11] and growing, the amount
of flow becomes surprisingly gigantic, somewhere between 11,285 and 20,350 terabytes. Of
course, not all of this email gets stored. Mail.com has 14.5 million email boxes and uses 27
terabytes of storage; with approximately 500 million mailboxes worldwide, the required storage
space is more than 900 terabytes, which means that only one in 17 messages is kept for some
period of time.

Mailing lists can be viewed as a subcategory in email. It is hard to determine the number of mailing
lists in existence, but we can approximate it based on some available statistics. One of the most
frequently used mailing list managers - LISTSERV - is used to send 30 million messages per day in
approximately 150,000 mailing lists [12]. A sample of mailing lists has shown that 30% of them are
managed using LISTSERV. Using this information, we would estimate the total number of mailing
list messages at 36.5 billion per year with aggregate volume of 675 terabytes.

Distribution of mailboxes has the same pattern as the distribution of web sites. While in 1984, 90%
of the world's e-mailboxes were located in the U.S., at the end of 1999 this number dropped to 59%,
and is expected to decrease even further. [13].

More Details

Usenet

Most of the statistics in this category are vague, so the numbers we have should be regarded with a
certain skepticism. Cidera, which is the 14th biggest news provider on the Internet [14], gets
approximately 0.150 terabytes of Usenet feeds per day. We would estimate the total amount of
original news feeds at 0.2 terabytes per day, which leads to 73 terabytes of original Usenet
postings per year, which are redistributed by local ISPs and news servers an endless number of
times.

FTP

We are missing any significant data on this sector, but we know that Walnut Creek CD-ROM archive
contains a total of 0.412 terabytes of data on two servers [ftp.cdrom.com and ftp.freesoftware.com]
and the amount of storage was expanding at 100% every year over the past 6 years [15]. It should
be noticed that the distinction between FTP and HTTP becomes more blurred, as more and more
file archives become available through HTTP.

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Internet

IRC, Messaging Services, Telnet...

These categories mostly represent a flow of information as opposed to the stock. Liszt.com has one
of the biggest directories of IRC channels - 37750 channels on 27 networks, with 150,000 users, all
of them typing text as fast as they can. [16]

References

[1] "Sizing the Internet," Cyveillance, http://www.cyveillance.com/resources/library.asp

[2] "The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value," BrightPlanet LLC,
http://www.completeplanet.com/Tutorials/DeepWeb/index.asp
[3] "Web Surpasses One Billion Documents," Inktomi Corp.,
http://www.inktomi.com/new/press/billion.html
[4] "Accessibility of Information on the Web," Nature Magazine, Volume 400, Number 6740, Page
107
[5] "Size of the Web: A Dynamic Essay for a Dynamic Medium," The Censorware Project,
http://censorware.org/web_size/
[6] "State of the Internet 2000," United States Internet Council & ITTA
Inc.,http://usic.wslogic.com/intro.html
[7] "Domain Statistics," DomainStats.com, http://www.domainstats.com
[8] "Sending AOL a Message," Newsweek, Aug 9, 1999, p.51
[9] "Email Facts," 24/7 Media, http://www.247media.com/research/trends/email.html
[10] "Like It Or Not, You've Got Mail," BusinessWeek,
http://businessweek.com/1999/99_40/b3649026.htm
[11] UC Berkeley Email Stats
[12] "LISTSERV Statistics," L-Soft, http://www.lsoft.com/news/default.asp?item=statistics
[13] "Year-End 1999 Mailbox Report," Messaging Online, http://www.messagingonline.com/
[14] "Top 1000 Usenet Sites" Freenix, http://www.freenix.org/reseau/top1000/
[15] David Greenman, Walnut Creek CD-ROM Archive
[16] Liszt.Com, http://www.liszt.com/

© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Broadcast

■ Originals
❍ World
❍ United States
● Radio
● Television
● Stock
● Rate of Change
■ Copies
● Radio
● Television
■ Fun Facts
■ Bibliography
■ Charts

Originals

World

Table 1: World
Unique Total Terabytes (Annual)
Number of Items per Conversion
Media Type Stations Year Factor Lower Bound Upper Bound
65.5 million
Radio (CIA Factbook hours of
43,973 .05 GB/hour 3,274 3,274
2000) original
programming
48 million
Television (broadcast
hours of 1.3 GB - 2.25
only) (CIA Factbook 33,071 62,769 108,638
original GB hour
2000)
programming
Total: 66,043 111,912

Table 1: United States

Unique Total Terabytes (Annual)
Number of Items per Conversion
Media Type Stations Year Factor Lower Bound Upper Bound

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Broadcast

15.8 million
Radio (FCC, 1999) 12,600 .05 GB/hour 788 TB 788 TB
hours
3.4 million
Television (broadcast
hours of 1.3 GB- 2.25
and cable networks) 1,884 4,470 TB 7,736 TB
original GB/hour
(FCC, NCTA, 1999)
programming
Total: 5,258 8,524 TB

Radio

Conversion Factor

Each hour of audio requires about 50 MB, if stored at MP3 quality. (Different sources cite different
figures, depending upon assumptions made about compression and sound quality.)

World

There are 43,773 active radio stations in the world, according to the CIA World Factbook 2000: about
16,500 AM stations, 26,000 FM stations, and 1,500 shortwave stations.

We estimate that FM radio stations broadcast 20 hours per day, AM stations 16 hours per day, and
shortwave stations 12 hours per day. Therefore, there are approximately 290 million hours (188 million
FM, 98 million AM, and 6 million shortwave) of radio programming per year. Applying the 50 MB/hour
rule of thumb, one may estimate an annual storage requirement of about 14,500 TB if one were to
record everything broadcast on the radio.

United States

As of 1999, there are 12,615 radio stations in the United States, according the Federal Communications
Commission: 4,783 AM, 5,766 FM and 2,066 FM Educational stations. As noted above, the two formats
broadcast different numbers of hours each day: 20 hours for FM stations, 16 hours for AM. Total US
broadcasting hours would therefore be roughly 85 million hours per year. Again, each hour of
broadcasting would require 50 MB of storage, using the MP3 format. Total storage required for all US
radio broadcasts is about 4,300 TB.

About 84% of US radio stations have music as their primary focus, and provide little original content.
(Source: Radio Marketing Guide & Fact Book, Radio Advertising Bureau 2000-2001) The remaining
16% are news, talk and religious stations, providing, presumably, almost 100% "original" information
each day. Regardless of format, a percentage of most stations' broadcast time includes some
commentary, weather reports, news updates, and traffic reports - perhaps an average of 5 minutes per
hour. In addition, radio stations average between 12 and 16 minutes of commercials per hour. We can
use this information to estimate how much "original" programming appears on the United States radio
airwaves:15.8 million hours. (This estimate excludes advertisements and music.) The equivalent in
bytes is 788 TB.

Television

Conversion Factor

Satellite TV transmits between 3 and 5 mb per second. Therefore, one hour of broadcasting will require
10.8-18 Gbits of storage (compressed to MPEG-2). We can estimate about 1.3 - 2.25 GB per hour of
TV broadcasting. Source: Internet Archive.

World

There are 33,071 television stations in the world, according to the CIA World Factbook 2000. If these
stations broadcast about 16 hours per day, this would equal about 193 million hours total programming.
We estimate about 1/4 of the programs are "original," - this is 48 million hours each year. Estimating
that one hour of video requires 1.3 GB of storage, then worldwide, program storage would be about
63,000 TB; using the 2.25 GB estimate, it would be about 109,000 TB.

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Broadcast
United States

As of 1999, there are 1,616 broadcast television stations in the United States, according the US Federal
Communications Commission. This figure includes the major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, PBS
and newcomers WB, UPN and PAX), the networks' affiliates, as well as local and public broadcasting
stations. In addition, the National Cable Television Association reports that there are 210 national cable
networks and 54 regional networks, as of August 2000. (54 more cable networks are planned but not
yet operational.)

If all 1,884 of these stations broadcast 20 hours per day, that would equal just under 14 million hours
per year. We estimate that about 1/4 of the television programs broadcast are "original" - this is 3.5
million hours each year, equivalent to between 4,400 and 7,800 TB.

Stock

In 55 years of programming, the networks have accumulated the following stock of material (Source:
Library of Congress Report, Television/Video Preservation Study: Volume 1: Report, October 1997).

Table 3: Stock of Material Accumulated by the Major Networks.

ABC 1,037,000 films/tapes
CBS 1,045,000 tapes and more than 150,000,000 feet of film
600,000 film reels (currently estimated at 100,000,000 feet) and
NBC 1,600,000 videotapes

Meanwhile, some of the major studios have accumulated original materials as well:

Table 4: Materials Accumulated by the Major Studios.

Disney 6,500 television programs on 80,000 reels and tapes
Fox 54,000 television programs on 780,000 reels and tapes
18,000 (through 1994) television programs on 217,000 reels and
MCA/Universal tapes
Paramount
(Viacom) 8,000 television programs on 1,200,000 reels and tapes
Sony/Columbia 35,000 television programs on 600,000 reels and tapes
Turner
Entertainment 20,000 television programs on 337,000 reels and tapes
Warner
Brothers 28,000 television programs on 1,000,000 reels and tapes

These figures overlap, of course, with those we have compiled for magnetic tape.

As of 1998, there are well over 18,000 hours of programs in syndication available to be aired. This is
equivalent to 18 TB of information. (Source: Television and Video Almanac 1998)

Rate of Change

The number of radio stations and broadcast television stations in the United States has increased
slightly - between 1 and 2% - every year since 1990.

While the number of cable television systems has decreased since 1993, the number of cable networks
(i.e. channels) has increased annually. 54 new cable networks are scheduled to be launched in the
coming year.

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Broadcast

Copies

Radio

World

We estimate that FM radio stations broadcast 20 hours per day, AM stations 16 hours per day, and
shortwave stations 12 hours per day. Therefore, there are approximately 290 million hours (188 million
FM, 98 million AM, and 6 million shortwave) of radio programming per year. Applying the 50 MB/hour
rule of thumb, one may estimate an annual storage requirement of about 14,500 TB if one were to
record everything broadcast on the radio.

United States

As of 1999, there are 12,615 radio stations in the United States, according the Federal
Communications Commission: 4,783 AM, 5,766 FM and 2,066 FM Educational stations. As noted
above, the two formats broadcast different numbers of hours each day: 20 hours for FM stations and 16
hours for AM. Total US broadcasting hours would therefore be roughly 85 million hours per year.
Again, each hour of broadcasting would require 50 MB of storage, using the MP3 format. Total storage
required for all US radio broadcasts is about 4,300 TB.

Television

World

There are about 33,000 television stations in the world (including some but not all cable stations),
according to the CIA World Factbook 2000. This means that there are approximately 193 million hours
of television programming per year (assuming each station broadcasts 16 hours per day). Estimating
that one hour of video requires 1.3 - 2.25 GB of storage, then worldwide, television would require
between 250,000 and 435,000 TB.

United States

As of 1999, there are 1,616 broadcast television stations in the United States as well as about 260
cable networks operating on nearly 10,500 cable systems. Each station broadcasts an average of 7,300
hours per year (again estimating 20 hours of broadcasting per day). If one wished to capture all of the
programming generated by every station and cable system, regardless of duplication, it would be about
88 million hours, requiring between 114,000 and 198,000 TB of storage.

Fun Facts about Broadcast Media.

Television
■ For many years, most large TV stations and the major networks subscribed to the Code of Good
Practices of the National Association of Broadcasting, which established limits on the number of
commercial minutes that could be telecast each hour. The limits were voluntary but widely
followed: 9 1/2 minutes of commercials during primetime; higher amounts during other times of
night and day. In 1992, however, the guidelines were ruled a violation of Federal antitrust law.
Throughout the industry, most pledged to continue the limits - but gradually that eroded, as
networks added more ad time. Prime time today has an average of 15 minutes of ads per hour.
The FCC regulates advertising only during children's programming: 10.5 minutes/hour on
weekends, 12 minutes/hour on weekdays. (Source: Gerald Baldasty, University of Washington
http://faculty.washington.edu/baldasty/Feb3.htm)
■ Approximately 7 in 10 television households, more than 65 million households, subscribe to
cable. (Source: National Cable Television Association)
Radio
■ There are currently more than 4,500 streaming radio stations on the Internet, distributed as
follows: Africa (16); Asia (109); Europe (970); North America (2,786); Oceania (235); South
America (166) and Internet Only (313). (Source: RadioDirectory,
http://www.radiodirectory.com/Stations/)

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Broadcast

■ "Talk radio," in which celebrities and experts from various fields answer listener "call-in"
questions and offer their advice on various topics, has grown spectacularly in recent years. The
"call-in" format is the fastest-growing in radio, accounting for nearly 1,000 of the 10,000
commercial radio stations in the United States. (Source: U.S. MEDIA IN THE 1990s: THE
BROADCAST MEDIA By Fredric A. Emmert, US Information Agency)
■ 6,108 new radio stations have been started in United States since 1970 (Source: Arbitron
Ratings, http://www.arbitronratings.com)
■ The average US listener 12 and older hears approximately 1,100 hours of radio each year.
(Source: Arbitron Ratings, http://www.arbitronratings.com)
■ Since 1996, commercial spot loads have averaged 12-16 minutes per hour. These averages can
be even higher during morning and afternoon drive hours. (Source: "An Analysis of the Effects of
Consolidation on the Radio Industry" http://mmstudio.gannon.edu/~gabriel/rapela.html.)

Bibliography

■ Arbitron Ratings http://www.arbitronratings.com/

■ Castleman, Harry. Podrazik, Walter J. The TV schedule book : four decades of network
programming from sign-on to sign-off. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984.
■ Central Intelligence Agency World Factbook 2000 http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/
■ Federal Communications Commission Audio Services Division, Broadcast Station Totals, 1990 -
1999 http://www.fcc.gov/mmb/asd/totals/index.html
■ Fletcher, William H. Making Instructional Digital Video and Audio Work,
http://miniappolis.com/mpeg/mpeg.html. April 1998.
■ Internet Archive. Phone 415-561-6767 or see http://www.archive.org/
■ National Cable Television Association http://www.ncta.com/directory.html
■ International Television and Video Almanac. New York: Quigley Publishing, 1998.
■ UNESCO, Latest statistics on radio and television broadcasting. Paris: UNESCO [United Nations
Organization for Education, Science and Culture] Division of Statistics on Culture and
Communication, 1987.
■ U.S. Census Department, 1999 Statistical Abstract of the United States,
www.census.gov/prod/www/statistical-abstract-us.html
See chart for more details

© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Phone

The material in this section is drawn from Coffman and Odlyzko (1998, 2000).
The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) database provides estimates of telephone traffic
for 207 countries for 1997-98, which total 2.5 x 1012 minutes per year. Adding in an estimate for the
missing countries brings us to 7.5 x 1012 minutes per year, or roughly 600,000 terabytes per month.
Compression would reduce storage requirements by a factor of 6 to 8.
The US accounts for about 250,000 terabytes per month, of which roughly a third is modem calls.

We have somewhat better estimates for long-distance traffic in the US, including voice, Internet,
public data networks and private lines.

Table 1: Traffic on U.S. long distance networks in terabytes, year-end 1999.

Network Traffic (terabytes/month)
US voice 48,000
Internet 10,000 - 16,000
Other Public Data Networks 2,000
Private Line 5,000 - 8,500

Notes
■ Internet traffic has, on average, been doubling every year for 30 years, though the growth
rates varied significantly during that period.

■ The current rate of growth of Internet traffic is roughly 100% per year.

■ By 2002 data traffic will surpass phone traffic.

■ Residential Internet use in the US is growing at about 30% a year. When residential users
switch to broadband, the total volume of data accessed increases by a factor of 5-10. As
residential broadband grows, traffic should approach the 100% per year growth rate.

■ Internal corporate (intranet) traffic is growing at about 30% per year, but corporate traffic to
the public Internet is growing at 100% per year.

■According to Peter Davidson, of Davidson Consulting, about 300 billion seconds of fax
transmissions take place annually. At 45 seconds per page, this means 400 billion pages per
year are faxed. At 15 Kb per page, this comes to around 6,000 terabytes of fax information
per year.
References
■ Internet growth: Is there a "Moore's Law" for data traffic?, K. G. Coffman and A. M.
Odlyzko, 2000. [Abstract] [PostScript] [PDF] [LaTeX]

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Phone

■ The size and growth rate of the Internet, K. G. Coffman and A. M. Odlyzko, First Monday
3(10) (October 1998), http://firstmonday.org/. [Abstract] [PostScript] [PDF] [LaTeX] [First
Monday version]

■ The Worldwide Fax Traffic Statistical Market Review and Forecast, 1997-2002, Peter
Davidson, [Link to Report]
© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Mail

This table of facts about US mail is from Odlyzko (2000). About half of all mail is currently first class
and about half is junk mail. If we assume 5 pages per piece of mail, and digitize it at 15 Kbytes per
page, 1998 US mail is about 150 petabytes per year.

Table 1: Statistics about US mail service, from Odlyzko (2000).

Year Cost Cost/GDP Pieces Mail per
(millions) (percent) (millions) Person
1790 0.032 0.02 0.8 0.20
1800 0.214 0.05 3.9 0.73
1810 0.496 0.09 7.7 1.07
1820 1.161 0.18 14.9 1.55
1830 1.933 0.21 29.8 2.32
1840 4.718 0.28 79.9 4.68
1850 5.213 0.20 155.1 6.66
1860 14.87 0.39
1870 24.00 0.33
1880 36.54 0.35
1890 66.26 0.51 4,005 63.7
1900 107.7 0.58 7,130 93.8
1910 230.0 0.65 14,850 161
1920 454.3 0.50
1930 803.7 0.89 27,887 227
1940 807.6 0.81 27,749 211
1950 2,223 0.78 45,064 299
1960 3,874 0.77 63,675 355
1970 7,876 0.81 84,882 418
1980 19,412 0.70 106,311 469
1990 40,490 0.70 166,301 669
1998 57,778 0.68 197,943 733

■ The history of communications and its implications for the Internet, A. M. Odlyzko.
[Abstract] [PostScript] [PDF] [LaTeX]
© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Acknowledgements

Overall
● Rita Gildea, EMC
● Jim Gray, Microsoft
● Andrew Odlyzko, AT&T Labs
● Dave Patterson, UC Berkeley
● Gil Press, EMC
● Robert Wilensky, UC Berkeley
Print
● Eric Chaskas, US National Archives and Records Administration
● Merilyn Dunn at CAPventure, via Kathy Jarvis at XeroxParc
● Rebecca Green and Lee Leighton, UC Berkeley Library
● Richard J. Hill, Newspapers Librarian, State Library of Pennsylvania
● Aimee Pyle and Amy Kirschoff, JSTOR
● Ginger Ogle, UC Berkeley Digital Library Project
● Rebecca Green and Lee Leighton, UC Berkeley Library
● Clara R. Williams, Information Consultant at the Hasleton Library, Institute of Paper Science
and Technology
Optical
● Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive
● Brian Lewin, International Recording Media Association
● Jim Taylor, DVD Association
Magnetic
● Fred Moore, Horizon Information Strategies
Telephone
● Peter Davidson, Davidson Consulting
Internet
● John McCredie and Jerry Berkman, UC Berkeley
● Steve Lawrence, NTT
● Scott Kirkpatrick, Archive.org
© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Site Map

About the Project

Charts
Sound Bytes
Data Powers of Ten

Executive Summary
Introduction
Information Produced by Medium
Qualifications
Duplication
Compression
Archival Media
World and US Production
Growth Rates
TV and Radio
Non-Digital Communication
Consumption of Information
Individual and Published Information
Appendices
Bibliography

Print Summary
Originals
Flow
World
United States
Notes on Conversion Assumptions
Stock
World
United States
Rate of Change
Copies
Flow
World
United States
Stock
Rate of Change
References
Charts
More Discussion

Print Details
Conversion Factors
Originals
Books
Conversion Factors

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Site Map
Flow
Stock
Rate of Change
Newspapers
Conversion Factors
Flow
Stock
Rate of Change
Periodicals
Conversion Factors
World
United States
Office Documents
Conversion Factors
Flow
Stock
Rate of Change
Visual Materials
Conversion Factors
Flow
Stock
Copies
Fun Facts About Print Media
Print Media Bibliography
Supporting Charts

Film Summary
Originals
Flow
Photographs
Motion Pictures
X-Rays
Stock
Photographs
Motion Pictures
X-Rays
Copies
Flow
Photographs
Motion Pictures
X-Rays
Stock
Photographs
Motion Pictures
X-Rays
References
More Details

Film Details
Impact of Digital Cameras on Rate of Growth of New Photographs
Conversion and Compression
Photographs
Motion Pictures
X-Rays
Flow of New X-Rays
Medical Imaging
Other X-Ray Uses
Copies

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Site Map
Copies of Motion Pictures
Film Factoids
References and Sources

Optical Summary
Originals
Flow
World
United States
Stock
Rate of Change
Copies
Flow
Stock
Optical Media Bibliography
Charts
More Discussion

Optical Details
Originals
Conversion Factors
Flow
World
United States
Stock
Copies
Flow
World
United States
Rate of Change
Bibliography
Charts

Magnetic Summary
Originals
Flow
Tape
Disks
Stock
Tape
Disks
Copies
Flow
Tape
Disks
Stock
Tape
Disks
More Details

Magnetic Details
Magnetic Storage Media
Hard Disk Drives
Floppy Disks
Removable Magnetic Disk Drives
Magnetic Tape

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Site Map
Digital Data Creation
Analog Storage Tape
Conversion Issues
References and Resources

Internet Summary
Introduction
World Wide Web
Email & Mailing Lists
Usenet
FTP
IRC, Messaging Services, Telnet, ...
References

Internet - WWW Details

"A Cyveillance Study: Sizing the Internet" Summarized
"The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value" Summarized
Excel Spreadsheet with further information.

Internet - Email Details

"Email Growth Hogs Enterprise Resources" Summarized
"AOL Per-User Email Figures Climb 60 Percent in 1999" Summarized
"Messaging Today: Worldwide Trends" Summarized
24/7 Media: Email Facts
Nov. 92 - Nov. 94 Messaging Statistics
Junk Email Statistics
Other Information
Final Thoughts

Broadcast - Summary
Originals
World
United States
Radio
Television
Stock
Rate of Change
Copies
Radio
Television
Fun Facts
Bibliography
Charts

Phone Summary

Mail Summary

Acknowledgements

Site Map

© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Charts

Here are some charts that show the relative sizes of various interesting magnitudes.

Over 93 percent of the information produced in 1999 was in digital format. (Authors' calculations.)

New books published in US. (US Statistical Abstract 1999, Table 938. Some years interpolated.)

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Charts

Newspapers and periodicals published in US. (US Statistical Abstract 1999, Table 941.)

Print summary. (Calculations by authors.)

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Charts

Photo summary. (Calculations by authors.)

Optical summary. (calculations by authors)

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Charts

Total and unique information on various types of hard drives. (Calculations by authors)

Worldwide PC hard drive capacity shipped. (1999 Winchester Disk Drive Market Forecast and Review,
Table C5, International Data Corporation report. Some years forecast.)

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Charts

Hard drive cost per gigabyte. (IDC reports.)

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Charts

Trends in EMC's stock price, megabytes per inch, and cost per megabyte. From Forbes, October 2,
2000.

US household media use. (US Statistical Abstract 1999, Table 920.)

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Charts
Activities performed by online households in the US during an average week, Q2, 2000.
(Economist Magazine, October 7, 2000, E-Entertainment Survey, page 11.)

Cost of transmitting 1000 words v Number of words available in USA 1960-1980. (Ithiel de
Sola Pool, Hiroshi Inose, Nozomu Takasaki, Roger Hurwitz, Communication Flows: A
Census in the United States and Japan, Elsevier Science Publishers, New York, 1984.)
© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Sound Bytes

Terror of terabytes.
One terabyte, the smallest practical measure for our project, is a million megabytes, which is
equivalent to the textual content of a million books. An exabyte, which is what we use to report the
final results, is a billion gigabtyes.

Capabilities of compression.
Conversion to ASCII, MP3, MP4 and other compression technologies dramatically reduces storage
requirements by one to two orders of magnitude.

Democratization of data.
Individuals produce significant amounts of non-digital information. As photos and videos move to
digital formats, households will have to manage terabytes of data.

Dominance of digital.
Ninety-three percent of the information produced each year is stored in digital form. Hard drives in
stand-alone PCs account for 55% of total storage shipped each year.

Magnetic migration.
Print and film content is rapidly moving to magnetic and optical storage. This is true for professional
use now, and will become increasingly true at the level of individual users.

Tape in transition.
Magnetic tape is about 10 times as large as disk storage, but is used almost exclusively for
archives. Disk storage is much more attractive, even for archives, due to its rapidly declining cost
and the fact that it is much easier to access data stored on disk.

Paucity of print.
If all printed material published in the world each year were expressed in ASCII, it could be stored in
less than 5 terabytes.

Immensity of images.
Over 80 billion photographs are taken every year, which would take over 400 petabytes to store,
more than 80 million times the storage requirements for text.

Convenience of copies.
There is a lot of redundancy both across and within media. A newspaper, for example, is
composited using digital technology, printed on paper, then archived on microfilm. Estimates of
``unique'' information can only be taken as approximate.

Ubiquity of the US.

The US produces 35% of all print material, 40% of the images and well over 50% of the digitally
stored content produced in the world each year.

© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Powers of Ten

Many of the following facts were taken from Roy Williams "Data Powers of Ten" page at Caltech.

■ Byte [ 8 bits]
● 0.1 bytes: a binary decision;
● 1 byte: a single character;
● 10 bytes: a single word;
● 100 bytes: a telegram ORr a punched card;
■ Kilobyte [ 1,000 bytes OR 103 bytes]
● 1 Kilobyte: A very short story;
● 2 Kilobytes: A tTypewritten page;
● 10 Kilobytes: An encyclopaedic page OR a deck of punched cards;
● 10 Kilobytes: static web page;
● 50 Kilobytes: A compressed document image page;
● 100 Kilobytes: A low-resolution photograph;
● 200 Kilobytes: A box of punched cards;
● 500 Kilobytes: A very heavy box of punched cards;
■ Megabyte [ 1,000,000 bytes OR 106 bytes]
● 1 Megabyte: A small novel OR a 3.5 inch floppy disk;
● 2 Megabytes: A high resolution photograph;
● 5 Megabytes: The complete works of Shakespeare OR 30 seconds of TV-quality
video;
● 10 Megabytes: A minute of high-fidelity sound OR a digital chest X-ray;
● 20 Megabytes: A box of floppy disks;
● 50 Megabytes: A digital mammogram;
● 100 Megabytes: 1 meter of shelved books OR a two-volume encyclopaedic book;
● 200 Megabytes: A reel of 9-track tape OR an IBM 3480 cartridge tape;
● 500 Megabytes: A CD-ROM OR the hard disk of a PC;
■ Gigabyte [ 1,000,000,000 bytes OR 109 bytes]
● 1 Gigabyte: a pickup truck filled with paper OR a symphony in high-fidelity sound OR a
movie at TV quality;
● 2 Gigabytes: 20 meters of shelved books OR a stack of 9-track tapes;
● 5 Gigabytes: 8mm Exabyte tape;
● 20 Gigabytes: A good collection of the works of Beethoven OR 5 Exabyte tapes OR a
VHS tape used for digital data;
● 50 Gigabytes: A floor of books OR hundreds of 9-track tapes;
● 100 Gigabytes: A floor of academic journals OR a large ID-1 digital tape;
● 200 Gigabytes: 50 Exabyte tapes;

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Powers of Ten

● 500 Gigabytes: The biggest FTP site.

■ Terabyte [ 1,000,000,000,000 bytes OR 1012 bytes]
● 1 Terabyte: An automated tape robot OR all the X-ray films in a large technological
hospital OR 50000 trees made into paper and printed OR daily rate of EOS data
(1998);
● 2 Terabytes: An academic research library OR a cabinet full of Exabyte tapes;
● 10 Terabytes: The printed collection of the US Library of Congress;
● 50 Terabytes: The contents of a large Mass Storage System;
● 400 Terabytes: National Climactic Data Center (NOAA) database;
■ Petabyte [ 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes OR 1015 bytes]
● 1 Petabyte: 3 years of EOS data (2001);
● 2 Petabytes: All US academic research libraries;
● 8 Petabytes: All information available on the Web;
● 20 Petabytes: Production of hard-disk drives in 1995;
● 200 Petabytes: All printed material OR production of digital magnetic tape in 1995;
■ Exabyte [ 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes OR 1018 bytes]
● 2 Exabytes: Total volume of information generated worldwide annually.
● 5 Exabytes: All words ever spoken by human beings.
■ Zettabyte [ 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes OR 1021 bytes]
■ Yottabyte [ 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes OR 1024 bytes]

© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Print Details

■ Conversion Factors
■ Originals
● Books
❍ Conversion Factors
❍ Flow
❍ Stock
❍ Rate of Change
● Newspapers
❍ Conversion Factors
❍ Flow
❍ Stock
❍ Rate of Change
● Periodicals
❍ Conversion Factors
❍ World
❍ United States
● Office Documents
❍ Conversion Factors
❍ Flow
❍ Stock
❍ Rate of Change
● Visual Materials
❍ Conversion Factors
❍ Flow
❍ Stock
■ Copies
■ Fun Facts About Print Media
■ Print Media Bibliography
■ Supporting Charts

Conversion Factors

To estimate the storage requirements for these non-digital information sources, one must make

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Print Details
some assumptions about the form in which they will be stored and the degree to which they will be
compressed. There is considerable variation in the "bytes per page" proposed by various sources,
partly because of differing assumptions about the content (e.g. ratio of text to pictures), formatting
(e.g. number of characters per page, amount of white space), and file storage method (e.g. whether
converted to a text or compressed document image file). Here is a sample of the range:
● According to Webopoedia: "A disk that can hold 1.44 megabytes, for example, is capable of
storing approximately 1.4 million characters, or about 3,000 pages of information." 1.44 MB =
1,509,949 bytes = 3,000 pages = 503 bytes per page
● According to Horison Information Strategies: 2,400 bytes (2.3 KB) for one page of paper. 300
- 500 MB for large encyclopedia
● According to Michael Lesk: 5,000 bytes (about 5 KB) per page (Source: "How Much
Information is There in the World?", 1997)
● 30 - 50 KB for a page of mathematical text in bitmap form (Source: Andrew Odlyzko, "Tragic
loss or good riddance? The impending demise of traditional scholarly journals," 1994)
● According to Roy Williams of CalTech, "Data Powers of Ten": 10 KB per encyclopedic (small
font, dense formatting) page, 50 KB for a compressed document image page
● According to ArchiveBuilders.com 50 KB for one scanned page but 800 KB for one scanned
engineering drawing
● According to JSTOR, a digital library of scholarly journals, one scanned document page is
130 KB; compressed using Cartesian Perceptual Compression (CPC) a page is only 26 KB.
● According to Internet Archive: 1 MB for one mystery novel. 1 copy of Encyclopedia Brittanica
= 1 gigabyte (2,619 pages per copy so 409,981 bytes or about 400 KB per page)
To demonstrate this range, for our estimates, we will use three different numbers: one for a scanned
image (uncompressed, at archival quality - 600 dpi), one for a compressed image file, and one for
and ASCII (or plain text) file. For the summary statements, will use the mid-range number, as most
documents are scanned with some measure of compression. We opted to use Cartesian Perceptual
Compression (CPC) as our compression standard because although it is a lossy algorithm, it is
"non-degrading" - the human eye can't determine any difference. And it keeps the full 600 dpi
resolution.

Originals

Books

Conversion Factors

To estimate the size (in bytes) of all books published in the world, use the following formula:

Average number of pages per book * Average file size per page * Number of books published per
year.

Table 1: Books Conversion Factors

Average # of Storage Format Average File Size Conversion
Pages per Item Factor
(rounded)
Scanned TIFF (600 dpi) 130 KB 40 MB/Item
300 Compressed 26 KB 8 MB/item
Plain text 2.5 KB 1 MB/Item

Flow

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Print Details

World

Worldwide, in 1996 there were 808,066 titles published, according to UNESCO's Statistical
Yearbook 1998, as cited in The Bowker Library and Trade Almanac. This is roughly equivalent to 7
TB/year. The editor of the Almanac notes problems with UNESCO's data-gathering--inconsistencies
in reporting, data collection lags, and missing data; nonetheless, the editor acknowledges that
UNESCO provides researchers the best and most usable overview of international book title output.
If one includes the most recently available title production figures for countries that did not show
1996 data (such as China, France, and the Netherlands), the annual world total increases to
968,735 - about 8 TB/year. This number is still not quite accurate because there are still about 70
countries of the world not documented by UNESCO. However, it is the best available estimate we
were able to locate.

United States

In 1997, about 64,711 books were published in the United States, according to the U.S. Census
Bureau's 1999 Statistical Abstract of the United States. The Bowker Annual Library and Book Trade
Almanac provides a similar figure for 1997 (65,796 titles) and notes that this is a decrease from
1996's all-time high figure of 68,175 titles. The preliminary estimate for 1998 suggested another
decrease, to 56,129 books, roughly equivalent to .5 TB per year.

Stock

World

To estimate the international stock of books currently available for purchase, we note that the United
States produces about 40% of the world's printed material. (Source: US Industry and Trade Outlook
2000) The national library and copyright repository of the United States--the Library of Congress--
contains about 26 million books. Therefore, using the 40% rule of thumb, the world stock of books
might be approximately 65 million titles.

United States

Books In Print is an authoritative source for books published and/or distributed in the United States.
The 1999-2000 edition of Books in Print (with supplement) includes 1,663,815 books - about 13 TB
in all. (This number does not include: books not published and/or not distributed in the U.S.; books
not available to the trade or general public; free books not included with a title for sale; unbound
material, pamphlets and booklets; periodicals and serials; books only available to members of an
organization; subscription-only material, and music manuscripts, sheet music, and librettos.)
According to a press release from January 2000, booksinprint.com 2000 includes 3.2 million titles -
about 26 TB total. (Of these, about 500,000 titles are out-of-print.) This figure is consistent with
online booksellers: Barnes & Noble.com asserts that it has 3 million titles available while Amazon
claims to have 4.5 million titles. Source: Wall Street Journal, July 17, 2000, "A New Chapter:
Independent Booksellers Hope to Find Strength in Numbers" by Scott Eden.

Rate of change

The number of titles published each year in the United States and internationally has risen gradually
and fairly consistently over the last 10 years, apart from a slight downturn in US title production in
1997.

Newspapers

Conversion Factors

A large metropolitan daily US newspaper will run approximately 60 pages each day, and may vary
from 48 to 72 pages. Therefore one year of a large US newspaper would consist of about 21,900
pages per year. To account for the smaller regional papers and those which are not published daily,
we opted to use 30 for the average number of pages, which results in 10,950 pages per year.

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Print Details

A double truck (center fold) full broadsheet is 24 in X 36 in. Because a newspaper page would be
scanned at higher resolution and contains detailed graphics, a double - truck would require about 1
Megabyte (uncompressed) and a single full broadsheet page (18 X 24 inches) would require about
.5 MB.

Table 2: Newspapers Conversion Factors

Average Storage Format Average File Size (per Conversion
Number of page) Factor
Pages per Year (rounded)
Scanned TIFF (600 dpi) 500 KB 5475
MB/item

10,950 Compressed 100 KB 1095

MB/item
Plain text 10 KB 110
MB/item

Flow

World

The number of newspapers in the world as of 1999 is 22,643, according to the International
Standard Serial Number Register. UNESCO's Statistical yearbook from 1996 offers a different,
much smaller figure: 8,391. The discrepancy is due largely to the fact that multiple ISSNs may be
assigned to what is essentially the same information product if it exists in two different formats
(paper, online, floppy disk, CD-ROM, microform). For example, the New York Times print version
and NYT online have two different ISSNs. Other differences may be attributed to the fact that
UNESCO's excludes non-daily newspapers from its statistics or that the UNESCO data set is less
complete than that of ISSN.

Using the ISSN figure and the compressed format:

.1MB/page * 10,950 pages/year * 22,643 newspapers/world = 124 TB/year

United States

According to the Newspaper Association of America, there were 1,489 daily newspapers and 897
Sunday - only newspapers published in the United States in 1999.

Stock

The Library of Congress provides useful statistics on the nationwide stock of printed periodicals and
newspapers. Most library print periodical holdings have been transferred to microfilm, microfiche, or
simply made accessible online, through efforts such as the National Endowment for the Humanities'
Newspaper Project. However, bound periodicals do still exist at the LOC: about 30,570 newspapers
and 557,738 serials.

Rate of Change

The number of newspaper titles and the circulation figures have both declined slowly over the past
10 years.

Periodicals

Conversion Factors

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Table 3: Periodicals Conversion Factors

Periodical Type Average # of Storage Format Average File Conversion
Pages per Item Size (per page) Factor
(annual total) (rounded)
Scanned TIFF 130 KB 225
(600 dpi) MB/item
Scholarly
1,723
Journal Compressed 26 KB 45 MB/item
Plain text 2.5 KB 4 MB/item
Scanned TIFF 130 KB 650
(600 dpi) MB/item
Mass-Market
5,000 Compressed 26 KB 130
Periodical
MB/item
Plain text 2.5 KB 13 MB/item
Scanned TIFF 130 KB 20 MB/item
(600 dpi)
Newsletter 150
Compressed 26 KB 4 MB/item
Plain text 2.5 KB .4 MB/item

World

According to the 2000 Ulrich International Periodical Directory, there are 158,000 unique periodical
titles in the world. If one wished to include all serial publications, for example, yearbooks, annual
publications of all kinds, not just journals, one could cite the International Standard Serial Number
statistics: 617,801 for all serials around the world.

It is useful to differentiate between scholarly journals and mass market periodicals because of the
differences in number of pages per year. According to a recent study on Economic Cost Models of
Scientific Scholarly Journals, "A typical 1995 scientific scholarly journal has 8.3 issues... and 1,723
pages (or 208 pages per issue)." (Source: http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/icsu/kingppr.htm) A typical
mass-market periodical, (such as Time, Newsweek, or People) that is published weekly, will be
about 5,000 pages per year. (Source: Robert M. Hayes, "The Economics of Digital Libraries",
http://www.usp.br/sibi/economics.html). There are also newsletters, smaller than both the scholarly
journal and mass-market publications, at about 100 pages per year.

Using the ratios within the US periodical statistics as a reference point (see below), we can estimate
that about half of the world's periodical publications are mass - market magazines/tabloids,
one-fourth are scholarly journals, and one-fourth are newsletters.

United States

According to the 1999 US Statistical Abstract, there are 12,036 periodicals published in the United
States. Given the world total of 158,000, this seems low. Another estimate on United States
periodical production comes from the National Directory of Magazines: 20,613 titles as of August
2000 (this figure includes Canada).

The estimated number of scientific journals published in the United States increased 62 percent,
from 4,175 in 1975 to 6,771 in 1995 (Source: Designing Electronic Journals With 30 Years of
Lessons from Print, Tenopir and King, 1998 http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/04-02/king.html) Data
on periodicals in the field of modern languages and literature may serve as a rough index of the
trends in the general availability of scholarly journals outside the sciences. According to the MLA

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Directory of Periodicals, there are currently 3,700 periodicals in the areas of literature, language,
linguistics, and folklore covered regularly in the MLA International Bibliography. This means that
there are about 10,500 scholarly journals in the United States.

According to the Newsletter and Electronic Publisher's Association (NEPA), there is no way of really
knowing exactly how many newsletters exist, because they are not required to be registered
anywhere. There are two directories of newsletters: the Hudson Subscription Newsletter Directory
lists over 5,000 subscription newsletters while the Oxbridge Directory of Newsletters includes over
20,000 newsletter titles, of which they say 9,000 are subscription newsletters. NEPA's best guess is
that there are approximately 10,000 subscription newsletters in print today. (Source:
http://www.newsletters.org/faqs.htm)

Office Documents

Conversion Factors

Table 4: Office Documents Conversion Factors

Average # of Storage Format Average File Size Total
Document Annual
Pages per Year Production
Scanned TIFF (600 dpi) 130 KB 975
TB/year
7,500,000,000 Compressed 26 KB 195
TB/year
Plain text 2.5 KB 19 TB/year

Flow

United States

To estimate the amount of information generated by offices, one might begin by looking at the
statistics of the Federal Government, which is the single largest employer in the United States, with
1.8 million civilian workers as of 1998 and 1.2 million individuals in the armed services. The Federal
Government, in total, employs about 3% of the nation's workforce.

The National Archives in Washington D.C. retains 2% of what the government produces, across a
range of media. According to Archives representative Eric Chaskas, the Archives retains only what
is deemed to be of some permanent historical value. Document types include correspondence,
registers, reports, forms, treaties, case files, and log books. The perceived value determines how
long a record will be retained--some will be kept indefinitely, while others are retained for no more
than 6 months. An effort is made to prevent duplicating records but there is still some degree of
overlap. Although the NARA representative was unable to quantify how much new information is
accessioned each year, he did state that the current archival holdings, as of July 2000, include 4
billion pieces of paper, occupying a total of 21.5 million cubic feet. That is about 200 pieces of paper
per cubic foot.

If one divides 4 billion by the number of years the United States government has existed (224
years), one could obtain a rough number of pages collected per year by dividing 4 billion by 224 -
the result is about 18,000,000 pages per year.

The current accession rate, however, appears to be much higher. Each year, Federal agencies
submit about 4,000 items and about 75% of these (3,000) are processed for archival. Although the
Archives does not publish statistics on the average size of these items, it is known that NARA adds
a total of 500,000 cubic feet of mostly paper-based records each year. As previously noted, in

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archives, 1 cubic foot can hold 200 pieces of paper, so the total annual accession rate is therefore
about 100,000,000 pages per year.

If this represents 3% of the nation's workforce, then one could estimate that United States
companies produce a total of more than 3 billion archiveable pages each year, equivalent to 78
terabytes.

World

Using our rule of thumb that the US produces about 40% of the world's printed materials, we can
estimate that each year the world produces 7.5 billion archiveable pages, which would be
equivalent to 195 terabytes.

Stock

Again, consider the US National Archives with 4 billion pieces of paper. If this is 3% of the United
States total, then the total stock of paper held by US companies is somewhere on the order of 130
billion sheets of paper - about 3,380 terabytes.

Rate of Change

Despite the increasing use of computers for communication and storage, the production and
retention of paper office records is on the rise. The materials within the National Archives has
increased in volume by more than one-third, just in the past decade.

Visual Material (Maps, Posters, Prints and Drawings)

This is a difficult category to quantify because, unlike the book, newspaper, and periodical
industries, there is no central agency monitoring the production of originals or serving as a
repository for the items. The best method for approximating the production statistics is to consider
the holdings of the National Archives and the Library of Congress.

Conversion Factors

According to the Library of Congress, maps scanned in at 300 dpi tend to be large, approximately
100 to 300 MB. (Source: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/formats.html#V)

Flow

For photographs, see the Film Summary portion of this paper.

During 1998, the Library of Congress added 60,150 maps, 1,881 posters, and 4,723 prints and
drawings to its collections.

Stock

World

[???]

United States

The Library of Congress has 4,523,049 maps in its collections. 85,216 posters and 405,708 prints
and drawings. The National Archives has another 5 million maps and drawings, as well as 13 million
still photographs and 9 million aerial photographs.

Copies

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For the past 10 years, the US has produced about 30% of the world's paper and paperboard output
(US Industry & Trade Outlook 2000). Other major producers are Asia, Latin America, Canada, and
Europe. As of 1998, total global capacity was 333.6 million metric tons, with growth predicted so that
by 2001 the annual total is expected to be 348.1 metric tons. A recent article in the Economist
supports this forecast stating that, during the period 1993 - 1998, "the production of printing and
writing paper in North America has grown by over 13%. Worldwide it has doubled since 1982."

There are four different commodity segments in the paper/paperboard industry, only two of which
are relevant to this study: printing and writing paper and newsprint. In 1999, the US produced 23.8
million metric tons of printing and writing paper and 6.4 million metric tons of newsprint. The most
recent global production figures (available from UNESCO's Statistical Yearbook) are for 1997, at
which time the world was producing 90 million metric tons of printing and writing paper and 36
million metric tons of newspaper.

For the estimates of printing/writing paper, we used the midrange figure of 26 KB per 8 1/2 X 11
page. We estimated 500 sheets of standard grade 8 1/2 X 11 paper would weigh 5 pounds.
Therefore, each metric ton (2204 pounds) equals about 440 500-sheet-reams or 220,000 sheets.
Multiplying by 26 KB per page results in 6 GB per metric ton, for a total annual storage capacity of
142,800 possible terabytes (US) and 540,000 terabytes (world).

For newspapers, we estimate that storage requirements would be be about 2 times that for
writing/printing paper (12 GB per metric ton). Newspapers tend to contain more words and
graphics per page, requiring, on average 1 MB per page. Furthermore, newsprint is thinner and
lighter, so each metric ton contains more individual sheets. US newsprint production in 1997
equalled about 80,000 terabytes and international production was about 432,000 terabytes.

These figures provide an extreme upper bound on the total number of bytes required to digitally
store information currently produced in printed format each year.

Books

About 1.1 billion books were sold in the United States in 1999. (Source: Wall Street Journal, July
17, 2000, "A New Chapter: Independent Booksellers Hope to Find Strength in Numbers" by Scott
Eden.) This is an increase of more than 3% from 1998 when about 1,037,000 books were sold.
(Source: The 1999 Consumer Research Study on Book Purchasing, (Section II) Detailed Findings:
Consumer Adult Book Purchasing).

Newspapers

In the United States 55,979,332 daily newspapers and 59,894,381 Sunday newspapers circulate
each year. (Source: Newspaper Association of America.)

Periodicals

The total number of US magazines circulated annually exceeds 500 million. (Source: US Industry
and Trade Outlook 2000.)

Office Documents

Each year, almost 500 billion copies are produced on copiers in the US (13,000 TB); nearly 15
trillion copies are produced on copiers, printers, and multi - function machines. 15 trillion copies is
roughly equal to 390,000 TB. This accounts for the majority of the printing/writing paper used each
year. (Source: XeroxParc.) For specific information on fax printing, see the Telecommunications
Summary of this report.

A 1998 Coopers & Lybrand study showed that the average office makes 19 copies of each
document. The average office loses 1 out of 20 office documents. It then costs: $120 to search for
the document; $250 to recreate it, if lost (1 lost document = $370). (Source: NAGARA, Records
Management Technical Bulletin www.nagara.org/rmbulletins/bulletin_2.htm)

The Government Printing Office, which handles the printing needs of the entire Federal community,

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uses or sells more than 55 million pounds of paper each year. Approximately 10,000 titles are
available for sale to the public at any given time.

Fun Facts About Print Media

Paper Size Equivalencies

According to ArchiveBuilders.com: 1 pulp tree (loblolly pine) = 1/10th cord of wood = 10,000 pages
= 1 file cabinet = 4 boxes = 1/2 Gigabyte = 1 CD

Scope of the Library of Congress Collections

"LC21: A Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress," (a report from an advisory group at the
National Academy of Sciences about strategic directions for the applications of information
technology in the Library) reports the following statistics about the collections of the Library of
Congress:
● 26 million volumes (pages 2-3)

● 1 million serials (pages 2-3)

● 4.5 million maps (pages 2-5)

● 1,000,000 audio recordings (pages 2-6)

● 200,000 cans of film (pages 2-6)

● 13.5 million images (pages 2-7)

● 70,000 periodicals (pages 2-7)

● 1,400 newspapers (pages 2-7)

The Library receives some 22,000 items each working day and adds approximately 10,000 items to
the collections daily.

Paperless Society?

With the spread of the personal computer, many predicted the advent of the paperless office. So far,
this prediction has not come to pass. One one hand, according to BIFMA, a business and
institutional furniture manufacturer's association, as of Dec. 16, 1999, the percentage of file cabinets
in relation to other types of office furniture, like seating, desks, and tables, has steadily decreased,
from 16% in 1988 to 12.9% in 1998. This would lead one to believe that less paper is being
generated to require storage space. On the other hand, the installation of home computers and
expansion of home offices has led some analysts to predict that by 2003 the consumption of
standard office paper will double from the 1996 level (Source: 1999 U.S. Industry and Trade
Outlook, 10-3).

Growth of Online Periodicals

Of the more than 157,000 serial titles reported in the latest edition of the international periodicals
directory, 10,332 were available exclusively online or in addition to a paper counterpart (Source:
Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory, 1999, p. vii).

Bulk Mail

As of 1990, the United States Postal Service handled almost 90 billion pieces of first-class mail per
year and another 75 billion pieces of second- , third-, and fourth-class mail.

Americans receive almost 4 million tons of junk mail a year. About 44% of the junk mail is never
opened. Every person in the United States receives junk mail that represents the equivalent of one
and a half trees a year. (Source: The Consumer Research Institute's Stop Junk Mail Page)

For more information on flows of information through the mail, please see the Mail Summary of this
report.

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Print Media Bibliography

■ Bogart, Dave, ed. The Bowker Annual Library and Book Trade Almanac, 44th edition. New
Jersey: R.R. Bowker, 1999.
■ Cummings, Anthony M., Marcia L. Witte, William G. Bowen, and Laura O. Lazarus. University
Libraries and Scholarly Communication: A Study Prepared for the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation. The Association of Research Libraries, 1992
■ Hayes, Robert M., UCLA School of Information Science, "The Economics of Digital Libraries"
www.usp.br/sibi/economics.html
■ King, Donald W. and Carol Tenopir. "Economic Cost Models of Scientific Scholarly Journals,"
1998. www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/icsu/kingppr.htm
■ American Forest and Paper Association, 1999 Statistics for Paper, Paperboard and Wood
Pulp. Washington, DC, 1999. To order a copy, see www.afandpa.org/about/about.html or call
(800) 244-3090.
■ Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1999.
■ ArchiveBuilders.com White Paper, "Computer Storage Requirements for Various Digitized
Document Types"
■ Association of Research Libraries Statistics www.arl.org/stats/index.html
■ Books in Print, 1999-2000. New Jersey: R.R. Bowker, 1999.
■ International Standard Serial Number Register www.issn.org
■ International Standard Book Number Register www.isbn.org
■ JSTOR digital library. www.jstor.org/
■ Magazine Publishers of America, Information Center, (212) 872-3745.
www.magazine.org/resources/fact_sheets/ed1_8_99.html
■ National Directory of Magazines, www.mediafinder.com/mag_home.cfm
■ Newsletter and Electronic Publisher's Association (NEPA) www.newsletters.org/faqs.htm
■ Newspaper Association of America, Facts About Newspapers.
■ Newspaper Project, National Endowment for the Humanities,
www.neh.gov/preservation/usnp.html
■ Oxbridge Directory of Newsletters 1997. New York: Oxbridge Communications, Inc., 1997.
■ Ulrich's International Periodical Directory. New York: Bowker Publishing, 2000.
■ UNESCO Statistical Yearbook 1999. Paris, UNESCO, 1999.
■ U.S. Census Department, 1999 Statistical Abstract of the United States,
www.census.gov/prod/www/statistical-abstract-us.html
■ U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics
■ U.S. Government Printing Office, Prepared Statement before the Committee on Rules and
Administration, U.S. Senate on Public Access to Government Information in the 21st Century
July 1996.
■ U.S. Industry and Trade Outlook. Available in print from McGraw Hill/U.S Department of
Commerce Washington, D.C. or download from www.ntis.gov/products
■ Chaskas, Eric. US National Archives and Records Administration.
■ Walden's Paper Report. Twice-monthly newsletter, published by Walden-Mott Corporation,
Ramsey, NJ. Available by subscription only. See
www.walden-mott.com/PaperReport/PAP_RPT.HTM or call (201) 818-8630.

Charts

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■ Impact of Digital Cameras on Rate of Growth of New Photographs

■ Conversion and Compression
● Photographs
● Motion Pictures
● X-Rays
■ Flow of New X-Rays
■ Medical Imaging
■ Other X-Ray Uses
■ Copies
■ Copies of Motion Pictures
■ Film Factoids
■ References and Sources

Impact of Digital Cameras On Rate of Growth of New Photographs

80 billion new photographs are taken around the world every year. Photography generally follows
the trends of the overall economy, for example, in the mid-1990's there was a slight slowdown in
photography concurrently with the economic recession experienced in many major world
economies, particularly those in Asia. However, it is expected that in the next five years there will be
continuing growth in the overall number of photographs as the enormous potential of China, India
and other developing regions is realized. At the present 25% of film sales occur outside of North
America, Western Europe and Japan. In June 2000 Kodak announced that China was its second
largest market after the United States. To give some perspective to the growth potential for
photography in China, film usage there is currently less than one roll per capita as opposed to 3.6
rolls per capita in the United States. Similarly, only 15% of Chinese households own cameras as
opposed to over 80 percent in the United States.

A countervailing trend to the growth of silver halide film based photography is the increasing
popularity of digital photography. Very rapid growth is predicted over the next five years for this
method of taking pictures. In 1999, in the United States almost 2 million digital cameras were sold,
double the number from the year before and representing about 12 percent of all cameras sold. In a
survey by NPD Intellect, more than 70% of consumers planning to buy a new camera say they will
choose a digital one. Kodak projects that digital photography will account for forty-five percent of its
revenue by 2005 from a current 17%.

Photofinishing News and Lyra Research predict that there will be an 80 percent growth in the
number of digital cameras worldwide by the year 2002. There were 8.3 million digital cameras in use
worldwide in 1999 according to this study. (compared to 200 million conventional film cameras in the
United States alone). Salomon Smith Barney predicts that the growth of photographic exposures
worldwide will grow from 71.4 billion in 1997 to 96.8 billion by 2002. At the same time, they expect
digital camera exposures to grow 1500 percent. Many of these photographers will use web photo
services. For example, Photo Works already hosts over 100 million images on its web site and there

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are many more companies competing in this same market. These companies indicate that at this
time 60 to 80 percent of the photographs on their web sites are scanned from silver halide film.

Kodak predicts that the growth trend will predominate until at least 2004, at which point traditional
film will gradually decline in use as the digital camera becomes ascendant.

The Internet may actually be increasing demand at the present for traditional photographs points out
Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. eBay has 4 million items for sale every day and the inventory turnover
averages about 7 days. About 80 percent of these items are accompanied by a photograph. About
one-half of one percent of current U.S. photographs are pictures of merchandise offered for sale on
eBay.

Table 1: Photographic Exposures (Billions)

Year: 1992 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2005

World 56 84.4 83.3 82 89

US 21 24.9 26.9 34.4 41.2

Source: 1992 statistics are from U.S. Industrial Outlook 1994; 1997 and 1998 U.S. Statistics are
from U.S. Industry and Trade Outlook 2000; 1997 and 1998 world statistics are from the Silver
Institute. The 1999 world figure is from Kodak's corporate web page. The 2000 U.S. figure is from
Kodak and printed in May 8, 2000 Wall Street Journal. The 2002 projection for the world is from the
Silver Institute. The 2005 projection is from the May 8, 2000 Wall Street Journal article and
attributed to Kodak.

Chart of the annual production of film used in conventional photography in the United States.

Conversion and Compression

Photographs

To assess the amount of data in terms of bits in a photograph, certain assumptions must be made
about the size of the film used and the technical way in which the photograph is digitized and stored.
Professional photographers generally use physically larger film formats with more chemical grains
on the film to store information than do amateur photographers. Conversion of these professional
photographs to a digital medium, therefore, generates a much bigger computer file. For example,
high quality professional photographs may require 40 megabytes or more of storage space.

In the early 1990's Kodak introduced the PhotoCD format for the storage of photographs on
compact disks. Since then, the format has been widely used by consumers, professional
photographers and archivists. Kodak estimates that most photographs can be converted to its
PhotoCD format with little to no loss of image data in 5 megabytes. Kodak's rule of thumb is that it
can place 100 photographs on one CD, which holds approximately 650 megabytes. For the sake of
carrying out our estimates of total photographic data, therefore, we use this same 5 megabyte
figure.

Of course, actual digital storage of photographs might consume far less space if any of the very
popular compression schemes are used. For example, the JPEG standard is commonly used to
reduce photographic file sizes to one-tenth of their original size. However, this is a "lossy"
compression, i.e., one where data is irrecoverably discarded in the compression.

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The 5 megabyte conversion factor used is also supported empirically by the extensive image
digitizing experience of the University of California, Berkeley Digital Library. The photographic
collection there is reported as containing 164,702 images which require 888 gigabytes of storage
space, or just over 5 megabytes per photograph.
(http://elib.cs.berkeley.edu/admin/rpts/TestSuite/00q2.html)

Motion Pictures

The conversion of motion pictures to digital media can result in very large file sizes. It is estimated
that each frame of film can be digitized in about 12 megabytes. However, to create the illusion of
seamless motion, 24 images are used per second of film. Thus, one second of film requires 288
megabytes of digital storage, one minute requires 17.28 gigabytes, and one hour requires 1
terabyte. At this rate a feature length film of 100 minutes would fill about 400 typical DVD's. Fox
Animation Studios, for example, reports that its animated feature "Anastasia" is 1.49 terabytes in
size. This particular film was digitally inked and painted and only then transferred to film for
theatrical distribution.

In cases where film will be distributed or stored on digital media such as DVD's some form of
compression must be used to make the file sizes tractable. The most common compression format
now used for motion pictures is MPEG-2. Using this format, a feature lenth film can be reduced to
several gigabytes in size and placed on a single DVD. This is a "lossy" compression format where
data that is present on the film is irrecoverably lost in the compression process.

X-Rays

The conversion of x-ray images to bits requires careful attention to the loss of information because
of the attendant risk of harm to patients. See, The Economist, "Why JPEG's Can Be Bad For Your
Health", June 2000, citing a study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology in
which researchers found that using JPEG with a compression ration of 16:1, the error rate was 30%
higher than for uncompressed images. In fact, in the United States conversion of x-rays to digital
format is regulated by the U.S. Government for the protection of the patients. FDA Regulation
510(k).

1 chest X-ray = 1 megabyte (14 x 17 inches), 150 dpi, 12 bits (compressed). 12 bits per pixel,
provides 4,096 shades of grey) (wavelet compression, lossless mode, has FDA 510(k) approval)
150 dpi, 12 bit images recommended by American College of Radiology for primary reads). (Source:
Steve Gilheany, Archive Builders )

A team of radiologists from the University of Florida estimated the size of a converted conventional
radiograph as 10 megabytes assuming a matrix size of 2048 x 2580 pixels with a 16-bit sample of
each pixel. This estimate assumes there will be no compression. Honeyman, Huda, Frost, Palmer &
Staab, "Picture Archiving and Communications System Bandwidth and Storage Requirements",
Journal of Digital Imaging, Vol. 9, no. 2, May 1996.

A slightly smaller estimate of the amount of storage required for a standard chest x-ray comes from
the University of Pittsburgh, Clinical Multimedia Lab, which estimates the size for a radiograph (2K *
2K * 16 bits) as approximately 8 megabytes (uncompressed). Clunie, David A., Lossless
Compression of Grayscale Medical Images - Effectiveness of Traditional and State of the Art
Approaches (Link to this paper (PDF))

This latter figure will be used because it does not assume compression and is generally consistent
with the assumptions made for converting traditional photographic film to digital format.
Furthermore, Dr. H.K. Huang, Radiologist at UC San Francisco, estimates that "a typical
examination generates betwen 10 and 20 MBytes." Huang, "Teleradiology Technologies and Some
Service Models" Computerized Medical Imaging and Graphics, Vol.20, No.2 (1996). Applying this
assumption of 8 mb per x-ray image results in a total amount of data stored on x-ray film of 16
petabytes.

Flow of New X-Rays

There are three common uses of x-ray film: medical imaging, dental imaging and non-destructive

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testing in manufacturing processes. The Silver Institute Reports that the medical uses of x-ray film
overwhelm the other categories, accounting for 92% of the world's overall x-ray film usage.

Medical Imaging

The administration of radiologic procedures in the United States and the developed world are fairly
well documented. The number of such procedures in the developing world, however, are harder to
come by. The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation found that no
data at all could be found for radiological procedures for half the world's population and that there is
only fragmentary data on examination rates for another quarter of the world's population.

Table 2: Medical X-Ray Procedures in United States

1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000

275 280 286 291 297 303 309 315 320

Source: Theta Reports

The UN Committee observed that the developed nations of the world use x-rays at a rate generally
consistent with that of the United States, i.e., approximately 1000 procedures (including dental uses)
for 1000 population. Therefore, on the assumption that the developed world's population is 1.2
billion, then a rate of x-ray procedures of slightly more than one per person per annum would yield
approximately 1.2 billion x-ray procedures per year in the developed world. The population of the
less developed world is 4.9 billion. If it is assumed that there are another 0.5 billion x-ray procedures
performed for this population, a rate one-tenth that of the developed world, then the world total of
annual medical and dental x-ray procedures is 1.7 billion.

According to Clinica Reports and Theta Reports, the world market for x-ray film is approximately
$3.5 billion per year with the United States market accounting for around $1.4 billion of that total
amount, a 40% share of the world market. If the dollar share of the market is reflective of the share
of procedures performed than there are about 750 million x-ray procedures annually. On the other
hand, it is reasonable to assume that film is sold for less in dollar terms around the world than in the
United States. If it is assumed that the price of film in other markets is 50% of that in the United
States, then this would work out to about 913 million x-ray procedures outside of the U.S., and
around 1.2 billion for the entire world.

Another approach to verifying these estimates is to take into account the use of silver for the
production of x-ray film as estimated by the Silver Institute. In 1998, 71.5 million troy ounces of silver
were used for medical x-ray film and that was sufficient to produce 387 million square meters, or 4.2
billion square feet, of x-ray film. This implies that one ounce of silver is enough to produce 5.4
square meters, or 58 square feet, of medical x-ray film. Theta Consulting estimated U.S.
consumption of 1.7 billion square feet of medical x-ray film to perform 309 million procedures in
1998, indicating usage of an average of 5.5 square feet of film per procedure. If the same amount of
film were used per procedure in the rest of the world, 450 million medical x-ray procedures were
performed there. This is consistent with a world wide x-ray procedure total of 750 million.

We have chosen to estimate the total number of world medical x-ray procedures at 1 billion annually
as a reasonable balance of the available statistics and assumptions discussed.

In order to determine the actual number of x-ray images taken some calculation must be made
based upon the average number of films taken per procedure (more than one image may be
captured on one film). In fact, the number of films used per procedure varies considerably. If 2 films
are shot for each x-ray procedure, there are approximately 2 billion x-ray medical images taken
worldwide every year.

Other X-Ray Uses

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The other major uses for x-ray film are dental imaging and the non-destructive testing of materials in
manufacturing and fabrication processes. These uses are approximately 8 percent of overall x-ray
film usage in developed nations according to the Silver Institute. Accordingly, based upon the
finding of 2 billion x-rays for medical purposes, then industrial and dental uses would amount to 160
million x-rays in the developed world for all purposes. The total world use of x-ray film is therefore
approximately 2.16 billion images annually.

Copies

As more photographs are digitized through inexpensive home scanners or are taken on digital
cameras in the first place, it is not yet clear how often paper copies will be made. Furthermore, it is
still unknown whether output from digital storage will typically be on photographic paper, or by
means of ink jet or thermal printers. Current indications are that ink jet printing will be the most
common process. In the year 2000, it is estimated that United States consumers will print out 5.4
billion photographic pictures, mostly at home. By the year 2005, this will quadruple to 26 billion. At
the same time, traditional photoprocessing is expected to grow only 20 percent to 41.2 billion prints.
(Source May 8, 2000 Wall Street Journal.)

The most common use made by consumers of digital images so far has been sharing them through
e-mail. Similarly many new businesses are counting on the consumer's desire to share digital
photos by hosting them on web sites. In December 1999 there were over 25 million unique home
visitors and 12 million work visitors to the web sites of over one hundred companies providing
photographic hosting services.

It is anticipated that the growing number of digital images owned by consumers will have a dramatic
impact on their need to consider making backup copies of their personal disk drives. Traditionally,
only a small percentage of home computer data is original data that requires backup at all. This
need will grow dramatically if many photographs are stored digitally. The web hosting companies
are counting on consumers storing the data on their sites and ordering prints from time to time.
Currently, consumers are able to get free photo developing and unlimited disk space from these
companies.

Copies of Motion Pictures

The Wolfman Report on the Photographic & Imaging Industry in the United States states that the
average number of prints per original motion picture is 700. The Silver Institute, however, reports
that 6,000 release prints are made for each feature movie. Interestingly, however, these copies are
short-lived. 98 percent of all films for theatrical distribution made in the United States are destroyed
by FPC, Inc.of Mountain City, Tennessee. After the films are no longer being shown in movie
theaters, they are sent to FPC, which destroys10 million pounds of film every year. The film is
shredded and sent to FPC's parent company, Kodak, where it is recycled and made into new film or
fuel used in power plants. (Source: Associated Press)

Film Factoids
■ Kodak describes the photography market as follows: 82 billion pictures processed a year
throughout the world with 750 million rolls of film processed annually in the United States and
2.9 billion rolls consumed worldwide. Kodak also estimates that of the photographs that are
processed approximately 2 percent are later reprinted or reused in some way.

SOURCE: http://kodak.com/US/en/corp/georgeFisher/shihPres.shtml, Presentation to

Imaging Technology Analysts Group on February 24, 1999. by Willie Shih, President, Digital
and Applied Imaging, and Vice President, Eastman Kodak Company.

More than 82% of U.S. households have cameras and use them to take over 17 billion
pictures annually. It is estimated that there are over 150 billion photographs stored in those
households. "Instant Images" Fortune, Winter 1997 (Technology Buyer's Guide Supplement)
184-187. This article cites these figures as according to the Photo Marketing Association.

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According to Kodak, China has become its second largest market. The per-capita film
consumption in China averages one roll a year, as compared with 3.6 rolls in America. Only
15 percent of Chinese own cameras. (XINHUA ECONOMIC NEWS SERVICE, 6/13/00).

■ The United States Library of Congress reports that it holds 12 million photographs in its
collection.

■ Number of UK Feature Films Produced Annually (1912-1998)

■ The Department of Commerce cites the journal Medical Imaging for the statistic that "U.S.
health care systems spend up to $7 billion a year on film alone." U.S. Industry and Trade
Outlook 2000, 44-18. Unfortunately for the film manufacturers, this probably overstates the
amount of sales by a wide margin. Theta Reports puts the sales of x-ray film at $1.4 billion in
1996 and expects it to reach $1.5 billion by 2000.

■ American women undergo approximately 30 million mammograms annually. Medical Industry

Today, December 20, 1999.

■ Approximately 150 million chest x-rays are done in the United States each year.(Source:
University of Pittsburgh, Clinical Multimedia Lab).

■ The Silver Institute reports that 92 million ounces of silver was used in 1999 for radiography
throughout the world. This association also reports that dental and commercial uses of x-ray
film traditionally account for about 8% of the total radiography market.

■ In 1996 it was estimated that the average institutional radiology department would generate
approximately 15.7 gigabytes of data per day and 3.5 terabytes per year. Honeyman, Huda,
Frost, Palmer & Staab, "Picture Archiving and Communications System Bandwidth and
Storage Requirements," Journal of Digital Imaging, Vol. 9, no. 2, May 1996.

■ Production of x-ray film is essentially controlled by three companies: Kodak, Sterling

Diagnostic Imaging/Agfa and Fuji Medical Systems. The U.S. market for x-ray film is about $1
billion annually. Modern HealthCare January 18, 1999.

■ "More than 32.5 million mammograms and 4.5 million cardiac catheterization procedures are
performed each year in the U.S., and X-rays account for 70 percent of all medical imaging
procedures." PR Newswire, Feb. 29, 2000, " New GE Digital Imaging Technology"

■ Kodak sells about $800 million year in x-ray film. Associated Press, Nov. 26, 1999. This also
seems to suggest that the statistic cited above is incorrect as to the overall U.S. x-ray film
market.

■ "The reduction in the number of competitors is clearly seen in the medical X-ray film market.
In 1995, there were five global players: Du Pont, 3M, Kodak, Fuji and Agfa, sharing
approximately 90% of the world market. In 1996, Du Pont sold its X-ray film business to
Sterling, which subsequently announced the resale of the business to Agfa in January 1999.
The imaging division of 3M was spun off into a new company, Imation, in 1996, and this was
subsequently purchased by Kodak in August 1998 for US$520 million. There are now only
three major players in the global market: Kodak, Agfa and Fuji, assuming that the
Agfa/Sterling deal is approved by the US FTC and the European Commission. This obviously
leads to dominant companies with market shares in excess of 40% in some major markets.
Further consolidation of these groups, however, would almost certainly run into legal
difficulties." Medical Device Technology (May 1999), Vol 10, no. 4

■ "Greater volumes of products and hence bargaining power are being concentrated into the
hands of a declining number of purchasers. The greater volume and value involved with each
negotiation mean that the market-share impact of either winning or losing a contract will

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increase. This can lead to a decline in prices, as witnessed following the merger of Columbia
and HCA, which was widely considered to have started the rapid decline of film prices in the
US market between 1996 and 1998. Prices fell by more than 20%, wiping approximately
US$150 million per annum off the value of the US X-ray film market." Id.

Film References and Sources

■ Photo Marketing International: http://www.pmai.org/

■ Photo Marketing Magazine: http://www.photomarketing.com/
■ Berkeley Digital Library Sunsite: Digitizing Imaging and Text:
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Imaging/

Reference Books

■ The Photography Encyclopedia (call number TR9.M39 1999)

■ Journal of Electronic Imaging (TK8315.J68)
■ NAICS 512110 Motion Picture and video production
■ SIC Code 7812 Motion picture and video production
■ The Film Encyclopedia
■ Guinness Book of Movie Facts and Feats
■ International Film Guide
■ Screen International
■ Screen Finance
■ Screen Digest
■ The Motion Picture Guide Annual 1999
■ The International Film Index, 1895-1990, edited by Alan Goble published by Bowker-Saur
(London: 1990).
■ The Silver Institute
■ Theta Reports, X-Ray Film Markets, Report No. 671, January 1997
■ University of Pittsburgh Clinical MultiMedia Lab
■ United States Government, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Center for Devices and
Radiological Health
■ United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, Reports to the
General Assembly, (New York 1993, 1994).

© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Optical Details

■ Originals
● Conversion Factors
● Flow
❍ World
❍ United States
● Stock
■ Copies
● Flow
❍ World
❍ United States
● Rate of Change
■ Bibliography
■ Charts

Originals

Conversion Factors

In its most common format, a compact disc (CD) holds about 650 MB.

A digital video disc or digital versatile disc (DVD) holds about 4.38 GB per disk - about 20 times
more data than a compact disc (CD). The DVD specifications describe four disk configurations:
single-sided (SS) vs. double-sided (DS) and single-layered (SL) vs. double-layered (DL) disks. Total
storage capacities for DVDs range from 1.36 GB to 15.90 GB as seen in the following chart,
reproduced from JimTaylor's DVD Demystified, an authoritative set of answers to Frequently Asked
Questions about DVD:

Table 1: DVD Storage Capacities

Format Capacity
DVD-5 (12 cm, SS/SL) 4.38 GB of data, over 2 hours of video
DVD-9 (SS/DL) 7.95 GB, about 4 hours
DVD-10 (12 cm, DS/SL) 8.75 GB, about 4.5 hours
DVD-14 (12 cm, DS/ML) 12.33 GB, about 6.5 hours
DVD-18 (12 cm, DS/DL) 15.90 GB, over 8 hours
DVD-1 (8cm, SS/SL) 1.36 GB, about .5 hour
DVD-2 (8cm, SS/DL) 2.48 GB, about 1.3 hours

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DVD-3 (8cm, DS/SL) 2.72 GB, about 1.4 hours

DVD-4 (8cm, DS/DL) 4.95 GB, about 2.5 hours
DVD-R 1.0 (12 cm, SS/SL) 3.68 GB
DVD-R 2.0 (12 cm, SS/SL) 4.38 GB, 8.75 GB for rare DS discs
DVD-RW 2.0 (12 cm, SS/SL) 4.38 GB, 8.75 GB for rare DS discs
DVD-RAM 1.0 (12 cm, SS/SL) 2.40 GB
DVD-RAM 1.0 (12 cm, DS/SL) 4.80 GB
DVD-RAM 2.0 (12 cm, SS/SL) 4.38 GB
DVD-RAM 2.0 (12 cm, DS/SL) 8.75 GB
DVD-RAM 2.0 (8 cm, DS/SL) 1.36 GB
CD-ROM (12 cm, SS/SL) 0.635 GB
CD-ROM (8 cm, SS/SL) 0.18 GB

Flow

World

It is a fairly simple matter to obtain information about the world music market value and units
shipped; organizations such as the Recording Industry Association of America and the International
Federation of the Phonographic Industry report these statistics each year. More difficult to obtain are
international statistics on the number of unique titles released each year. To obtain this figure, we
used statistics regarding the US market share and US record releases (see below) to estimate the
total releases worldwide. The United States holds a 37% share of the world music market and
releases about 33,100 items per year. Therefore, the world produces about 90,000 originals per
year, equivalent to 58 TB (uncompressed).

United States The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) reports annual figures for new
releases and album re-releases. The 1998 releases are equivalent to about 21 TB of data.

Table 2: Audio Releases

1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998
18,400 20,300 36,600 30,200 30,200 33,700 33,100
Source: http://www.riaa.com/MD-US-6.cfm

Stock

The All Music Guide (www.allmusic.com), a comprehensive entertainment database for music,
videos, DVDs and video games, provides statistics on the number of CD-audio originals in the
world. The AMG database is licensed by major music sites such as CDNow, ArtistDirect and
Tunes.com. AMG's listings indicate a total of 523,363 albums (445,735 popular music and 77,628
classical music albums). Each CD can hold 650 MB, so the total AMG catalog would equal roughly
340 TB.

According to the 1999 edition of CD-ROM's in Print, there are about 16,200 unique CD-ROM titles.
This figure includes business applications (such as word processing and spreadsheet packages),
games, reference tools, and instructional programs.

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Copies

Flow

World

Replication

Replication statistics include discs for retail as well as discs used for promotions, training, and
rental. Some percentage of the replicated discs also turn out badly and are never used. These
figures give us an upper bound on the amount of information that could be stored on compact disc
each year.

In 1999, there were 4,654 million audio CDs and 3,591 million CD-ROMs replicated worldwide,
according to the International Recording Media Association (IRMA). In addition, 194 million
DVD-Video units, 12 million DVD-ROM units, and 2 million DVD-Audio units were replicated in
1999.

United States

Replication

For audio CDs, data CD-ROMs, DVD-ROM, and DVD-Audio disks, North America produced roughly
50% of all the disks replicated. In addition, North America replicated about 75% of the DVD videos.

Retail

During 1999, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, 938.9 million CDs were
shipped to retail by U.S. producers. The U.S. has a 37% share of the world's sales. The nine next
largest markets are Japan, which follows our lead with 16.7%, followed by the United Kingdom
(7.6%), Germany (7.4%), France (5.2%), Canada (2.3%), Brazil, Australia and Spain (1.7% each),
and Mexico (1.6%). From the US figures and market share, one can extrapolate that CD shipments
worldwide are about 2,537 million units. This is equivalent to 1.6 billion TB.

Rate of Change

According to the London-based International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the
global music market was worth US $38.5 billion in 1999 - up by 1% in constant dollar terms with
total unit sales of US$3.8 billion in 1999. Overall units remained level, with a continued growth of 3%
in the CD market offset by a 10% decline in cassette sales and an 11% decline in singles.

Bibliography

■ The All Music Guide, www.allmusic.com

■ The CD Information Center www.cd-info.com/CDIC/index.html
■ CD-ROM Finder: The World of CD-ROM Products for Information Seekers. Medford, NJ:
Learned Information, 1993
■ CD-ROMs in Print, 13th Edition: An International Guide to CD-ROM, CD-I, 3DO, MMCD,
CD32, Multimedia, Laserdisc, and Electronic Products. New York: The Gale Group, 1999.
■ DVD Entertainment Group www.dvdinformation.com
■ DVD Insider www.dvdinsider.com
■ Taylor, Jim. DVD FAQ www.dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html
■ DVD Channel News www.dvdchannelnews.com
■ International Federation of the Phonographic Industry www.ifpi.org

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■ International Recording Media Association, Statistics page
www.recordingmedia.org/statistics/statistics_idx2.html
■ Medialine www.medialinenews.com
■ Optical Storage Technology Association www.osta.org/
■ SUN CD-ROM FAQ saturn.tlug.org/suncdfaq/
Charts

© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Magnetic Details

■ Magnetic Storage Media

● Hard Disk Drives
● Floppy Disks
● Removable Magnetic Disk Drives
● Magnetic Tape
■ Digital Data Creation
■ Analog Storage Tape
■ Conversion Issues
■ References and Resources

Magnetic Storage Media

The first magnetic storage mechanism was the Telegraphone invented in 1898 by Danish scientist
Valdemar Poulsen.

The digital revolution has so far been magnetic. The vast majority of the world's data is now created,
transported and stored in electro-magnetic systems.

Hard Disk Drives (World)

No storage medium has ever had the explosive growth demonstrated by the hard disk.

Storage Capacity
Year Disks Sold (Thousands)
(PetaBytes)
1995 89,054 104.8
1996 105,686 183.9
1997 129,281 343.63
1998 143,649 724.36
1999 165,857 1394.60
2000 187,835 2553.7
2001 212,800 4641
2002 239,138 8119
2003 268,227 13027

Source: IDC (1999) "1999 Winchester Disk Drive Market Forecast and Review"

The incredible growth in hard disk shipments has been accompanied by a relentless decrease in the cost

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per gigabyte of storage capacity:

Year Cost per GB GB's PER $200

1988 $11,540 0.02
1989 9,300 0.02
1990 6,860 0.03
1991 5,230 0.04
1992 3,000 0.07
1993 1,460 0.14
1994 705 0.28
1995 330 0.61
1996 179 1.12
1997 94 2.13
1998 43 4.65
1999 23 8.70
2000 13 15.38
2001 6 33.33
2002 3 66.67

Source: Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2000

Details regarding hard disk shipments.

Rates of Growth

The projections for the growth over the next few years in hard disk sales are for units shipped to increase
at an annual rate of 15 to 20% but for the actual capacity shipped to grow much faster - 70 - 80%
annually.

According to Disk/Trend, 75% of the disk drives sold are for desktop computers, followed by 13% for
servers and 12% mobile drives for laptop computers. Therefore, although enterprise level disk storage
systems each may have huge capacity, the vast number of disks deployed to individual workstations
really accounts for the enormous scale of the world's current digital storage capability.

The lifespan of a hard disk is approximately 3 years. The storage capacity of the hard disks shipped in
1998, 1999 and 2000 is 4672 petabytes, or roughly 5 exabytes. In order to appreciate the scale of this
statistic, consider that Roy Williams of CalTech advises that 5 exabytes is equivalent to the number of
words ever spoken by all human beings.

The hard disk typically shipped with a desktop personal computer in 2000 holds 10 gigabytes.

Disk drives are expected to be deployed in applications other than personal computers, such as TV
set-top boxes. These increasingly popular devices allow users to store TV shows on disk rather than tape
and to stop and rewind during a broadcast while still recording. In all, by 2003 the IDEMA predicts that
8-10 percent of the disk drive market will be such devices.Similarly, starting in the year 2000 audio
jukeboxes and computer game consoles will also include hard disk drives. Already the higher resolutions
of digital cameras are creating such large file sizes that small hard disks will be incorporated into
cameras as well.

Floppy Disks (World)

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The number of floppy disk drives sold every year has remained relatively constant at around 100 million
units for the past several years. Little change is expected. (Source: Computer Tech Review, April 1,
1999). The number of floppy disks being sold is diminishing rapidly as their storage capacity is too small
to be useful in light of the much larger file sizes now common.

3.5" Disks Total Capacity 5.25" Disks

Year
(billions) (terabytes) (millions)
1996 1.823 2625 32
1997 1.179 1698 11.7

Source: International Recording Media Association

The Japanese Recording Media Industries Association, however, claim somewhat higher figures for
floppy disk production, although confirming that the trend is still dramatically downward. This
organization, for example, anticipated sales of 2.21 billion floppies in 1998. It would appear that an
estimate of 2 billion for 1998, 1.5 billion for 1999 and 1 billion for 2000 would be a reasonable
compromise around these figures. This would indicate that there would be a total stock of floppy disks of
4.5 billion, assuming 3 years production as stock.

One of the world's largest producers of 3.5 inch floppy disks is CMC Magnetics. They claim to have
produced over 700 million disks in 1998. They also are purported to produce 56% of the world's floppy
disks in 2000, implying a market of somewhere north of 1 billion disks.

Floppy disks are used primarily for backup and are little used now for original content creation.

Removable magnetic disk drives (World)

Removable drives are primarily used for backup, transfer of files, e.g,, desktop publishing files to service
bureaus, or video or image editing. The general trend for low-end disk (capacity of around 100 to 250
megabytes, e.g. Iomega Zip Drives) sales is upward with a strong possibility that, if manufacturer
incompatibility issues are ever resolved, this format could replace the 1.44 mb floppy. However, high
capacity removable drives, with capacity in the gigabyte or better range, are being replaced by recordable
CD's, which in turn may be replaced by recordable DVD's.

Year Low-End Disk Drives High-End Disk Drives

1996 3723 992
1997 7724 1334
1998 12035 1164
1999 17039 701
2000 21775 623
2001 26087 578
2002 30182 554
2003 34287 541

Source: IDC (1999), "1999 Optical/Removable Storage Market Forecast and Review"

The high capacity drives (Iomega Jaz) come with a free cartridge and it is assumed that an additional
three cartridges are sold with each drive. Source: San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 23, 1998 "Does Bad
News for Iomega Mean Horrible News for HMT?"

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The amount of original content created directly to this medium is, therefore, probably quite low.
Furthermore, the disks are regularly reused and not generally viewed as archival solutions.

Magnetic Tape

Tape was the primary storage medium for the first generation of electronic computers in the 1950's.
Reel-to-reel half-inch tape was used for data storage on mainframe computers from the earliest days of
computing into the 1970's. Since that time, numerous tape formats have been developed. The worldwide
installed base for tape drive units is 25.2 million.Michael Lesk estimated that in 1995, the magnetic tape
industry would ship 200 petabytes of blank tape. (Lesk, M., "Preserving Digital Objects: Recurrent Needs
and Challenges").

Current estimates are that approximately $1 billion of tape media will be sold every year. Source,
Infostore July 1, 1999 (Tape: The Media Is the Message).

Worldwide Tape Drive Shipments - 1996-2003 (in thousands)

1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003
DC2000 3231.5 2365 1695.3 1867.3 1814.8 1749.4 1711.0 1688.7
SLR 350.4 327.1 311.7 290.0 278.3 272.0 267.5 266.8
4 mm 1370.0 1607.5 1634.8 1689.4 1650.5 1592.8 1525.9 1426.7
8 mm 201.8 213.6 180.9 138.2 131.0 127.7 135.1 149.3
DLT 160.0 356.4 366.1 483.5 550.3 612.5 677.4 746.5
LTO Ultrium 0 0 0 0 28.5 59.5 112.0 192.1
0.5" Cartridge 45.2 46.2 46.6 46.5 45.4 44.1 42.6 40.9
Total: 5358.8 4915.7 4235.3 4514.9 4498.9 4458.0 4471.5 4511.0

In a filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission in July 1999, Storage Tek, a large
tape drive manufacturer, wrote that the cost of data storage on computer tape media was less than
$.005/megabyte ($5.00/gb). Therefore, if predictions are correct that approximately $1 billion of computer
tape media is sold every year, that implies worldwide annual tape storage capability of 200 petabytes.
There may be some incongruity in these figures because the $1 billion may reflect manufacturer revenue
for the product, rather than the retail cost of the product to end users, which would presumably be much
higher. In fact, the Department of Commerce figures for the mid-1990's showed factory revenue for
computer tape manufacturer's of around $600 to 700 million. Substantial amounts of tape media are
manufactured in other countries so it is likely that $1 billion is a producer revenue figure.

If it is assumed that the retail price of the tape media is twice that of the manufacturer's then $2 billion of
retail sales of tape would work out to around 400 petabytes of storage capacity. The markup at retail over
manufacturer's prices is likely limited due to competition and the common practice of users purchasing
bulk quantities of tape. Further, some moderation is due to the lower price of DAT format.

Low-End Formats

The Imation DC2000, or Travan, quarter-inch tape drive is a low-end product used primarily for the
backup of desktop PC's. Their general capacity is in the range of 500 megabytes to 4 gigabytes. In
August 2000, a Sony Travan Formatted MiniCartridge capable of holding 4 gb uncompressed was
advertised for sale on the Internet for $29.49 each. A comparable 4gb tape cartridge manufactured by
Maxell was available for $30.79.

Tandberg SLR (Scalar Linear Recording) is also a backup format for desktops and workstations and
typically store 350 megabytes to 4 gigabytes.

4 mm tape drives are the largest segment of the market and use digital audio tape (DAT) format. They
are commonly deployed as backups for PC servers. These drives generally provide backup in the range
of 5 to 40 gigabytes (uncompressed). This format has an installed base of 7.6 million users.

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Magnetic Details

Mid-Level Formats

8 mm tape drives provide storage in the 14 to 50 gigabyte range. Vendors include Exabyte (Mammoth),
Sony (AIT), IBM (Magstar 3570).

DLT: (Digital Linear Tape) produced by Quantum Corporation. mid-range computer backup with 15 to 40
gigabytes of native capacity. There are more than 1.4 million DL Tape drives deployed and there have
been approximately 40 million tape cartridges in this format sold. Quantum estimates that by the end of
2000, there will be 1.9 million DLT drives shipped to customers.

LTO Ultrium. A new format from consortium of IBM, Seagate and Hewlett Packard. The specification for
the Ultrium format is for 100 gigabytes of native storage.

Enterprise Level Formats

1/2-inch cartridge: The dominant format in the mainframe, enterprise level storage market.

Automated tape libraries - which provide completely automated hands-off storage management, including
random tape access, sophisticated robotics, unattended backup, and reduced labor costs - are expected
to grow from less than 18,000 units shipped in 1996 to close to 120,000 units by 2002. (Source: Freeman
Reports)

There is an industry rule of thumb that suggests a three-to-one ratio of disk capacity over tape be
maintained.

Format 3490E 3480 Reel-to-Reel

1996 9.3 million 11.7 million 2.1 million
1997 10.7 million 9.5 million 1.9 million

Source: International Recording Media Association

The retail price in August 2000 of 3590 tape cartridges with 10 gb native capacity was $53.21. Fuji Film
DLT Tape cartridges were also available at retail for $51.10 for 10 gb native capacity. Sony DLT tapes
were being sold for $49.72 for 10 gb. uncompressed.
(http://www.cleansweepsupply.com/pages/skugroup2599.html)

From low-end formats such as Travan, through most popular format DLT, to high-end 3590 format, retail
price of roughly $5.00 per gigabyte of native storage capacity on tape seems reasonable estimate. (DAT
tapes are the only exception and are a lot cheaper.) Of course, if larger purchases result in substantial
discounts, then the revenue assumptions would commensurately be pushed more toward the $1 billion
wholesale estimate; therefore, not really affecting the calculation of the price per gigabyte of storage
capacity.

According to Computer Technology Review (March 1998) the total storage at a typical Fortune 1000 site
is projected to escalate from 10 TB in 1997 to 1 PB by the year 2000. In the next five years, a typical
large database system for US Government agencies is expected to accept 5TB per day and archive from
15 to 100 PB.

In 1995 Freeman Associates predicted that the total number of tape libraries would increase from 6,454
in 1994 to about 90,000 by the year 2000.

The estimate of the amount of original data stored on tape will, therefore, focus only on mass storage
applications from large-scale scientific applications to heavily transaction oriented business applications.
The installed base of IBM mainframe OS390 class computers is estimated by IDC to be around 16,500 in
2000.

The number of tape cartridges required to backup small sized computer disks is relatively few and will
never substantially exceed the capacity necessary to backup the entire hard disk or disk array. Typical

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Magnetic Details
backup storage strategy is to store the entire file system once and then do incremental updates of any
changes made, reducing the amount of storage necessary to keep a current copy of the entire file system
at hand.

In large scale tape libraries, there may be thousands or even tens of thousands of magnetic tapes
providing primary storage of the application data. The scale of storage requirements is growing rapidly as
new facilities, such as the Large Scale Hadron Collider, are built and start performing experiments. Large
scale databases are also becoming more common as corporations make increasing efforts to
comprehensively track consumer transactions.

The number of households conducting banking transactions may reach 32 million by 2003. The cost of an
Internet banking transaction is an estimated 1 cent, compared with $1.14 per transaction by teller, 55
cents by phone, 29 cents by ATM and 2 cents by proprietary computer system. (Source: "Banking on the
Internet")

The importance of massive scale databases in general commercial arenas is exemplified by the
experience of Wal-Mart, a leader in so-called "data mining" technology and the owner of one of the
largest privately held data sets. The U.S. Department of Commerce in its July 2000 report "Digital
Economy 2000" points out that "over a three-year period, Wal-Mart achieved a 47 percent increase in
sales on only a 7 percent increase in inventories by using a relational database system running on
massively parallel computers. The system allows vendors to access almost realtime information on sales
and customer transactions and handles 120,000 queries each week from 7,000 suppliers."

Digital Data Creation

Computers for the most part may not greatly contribute to the production of new and original data, but the
great exception is in scientific explorations where huge data sets are commonplace and where new
discoveries rely on computing and storage.

High Energy Physics

The Large Hadron Collider is being built at CERN in Switzerland, it is expected to be conducting
production experiments in around 2005. It is expected to generate approximately 20 petabytes of data
per experiment at rates of 100-1500 megabytes per second. Currently experiments in high energy
physics generate data at the rate of 35 megabytes per second and many hundred terabytes per
experiment. Obviously, this is all original data.

Source: Shiers, Jamie, "Massive-Scale Data Management using Standards-Based Solutions" IEEE 16th
Symposium on Mass Storage Systems.

The BaBar experiment at SLAC will generate approximately 200TB/year of data at a rate of 10MB/sec for
10 years.

Los Alamos National Laboratory estimated total storage capacity in its open storage system at 243
terabytes and in its secure system at 2.31 petabytes as of 1998. It is also anticipated that storage
capacity will grow to 5 petabytes in 2001.

GeoScience

The majority of data held and administered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are
held at three national data centers: the National Climatic Data Center at Asheville, NC; the National
Oceanographic Data Center at Silver Spring, MD; and the National Geophysical Data Center at Boulder,
CO. The climatic data is by far the largest of the three collections, holding approximately 640 terabytes on
350,000 magnetic tapes. The geophysical and oceanographic data total a combined 12 terabytes on
14,500 tapes.

The NASA Center for Computational Sciences in Greenbelt MD has 27,692 tapes holding data as of
August 2000. This Center is using 3590 and 9840 tapes which hold 20 gb per tape uncompressed. This
Center also automatically makes duplicate tapes for all new data generated. As of August 2000, this
storage facility holds 92.5 terabytes of unique data and over 162 terabytes counting the duplicate data.
New data is received at the rate of approximately 200-300 gigabytes per month.

The University of Tokyo stores satellite images in an environmental digital library of approximately 6

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Magnetic Details
terabytes, approximately 60,000 images that average 100 megabytes in size.

The San Diego SuperComputer Center stored as of August, 1998 approximately 65 terabytes. The SDSC
as of that time held the data on approximately 11,000 tapes. As of mid-2000, the SDSC is storing
1.5e+15 bytes.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in 1996 had about 68 TB and was growing at the
rate of 1.5 TB per month.

Analog Storage Tape

The first uses of magnetic media for data storage occurred about fifty years ago with the development of
magnetic tape. A number of formats have evolved over the decades but today by far the most prevalent
are the cassette tape used for the mass market distribution of prerecorded music. The other important
use of magnetic tape for the storage of analog signals is videotape recordings.

Analog Audio Tape

The distribtution of prerecorded music is one of the most common uses of magnetic tape. The sales of
music in this format, however, are now much smaller than they have been historically and are generally
expected to continue to decline as digital media become more prevalent and convenient.

United States
U.S. Sales 1982 1985 1990 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999
Cassettes(mil.) 182.3 339.1 442.2 339.5 345.4 272.6 225.3 172.6 158.5 123.6
Cassette
x x 9.2 11 11.2 12.6 16.9 18.6 27.2 14.2
Singles

Source: Recording Industry Association of America

Although there has been a dramatic decline in the overall sales of cassette tapes due to the availability of
music on alternative formats, there has been a booming market for books-on-tape. According to the
Audio Publishers Association, this market is estimated to have grown 100% since 1990. The reasons for
this are that cassettes can run 40 minutes longer than CDs, they have a built-in "bookmark", and they are
frequently listened to in the car, and 75% of cars are manufactured with only an AM/FM cassette radio.

The IFPI reports that for the entire world prerecorded music sales on cassette tape were down by 11% in
1998 to 1.2 billion due to depressed sales in Asia.

Blank Audio Tape

The U.S. shipments of blank audio tape dropped dramatically during the 1990's.

Manufacturers' U.S. Shipments of Blank Audio Cassettes

Year Dollars (000s Omitted) Unit (000s Omitted )

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Magnetic Details

1984 $268,287 243,061

1985 $286,865 295,313
1986 $336,179 368,488
1987 $363,336 387,518
1988 $369,550 396,587
1989 $397,734 429,963
1990 $387,895 437,840
1991 $367,716 436,659
1992 $369,769 436,739
1993 $353,022 437,783
1994 $338,428 438,949
1995 $301,316 415,028
1996 $247,442 330,353
1997 $215,576 296,151

Source: International Recording Media Association

Worldwide shipments of blank audio tape are expected to decline in 2000 to 921 million units from 971
million in 1999, with an anticipated market for 771 million cassette tapes by 2003. Source: Consumer
MultiMedia Report, Dec. 27, 1999.

Analog Video Tape

Prerecorded VideoTapes (VHS Format) (World)

1997 - 1.666 billion

1998 - 1.719 billion
1999 - 1.748 billion
2000 - 1.664 billion
2001 - 1,561 billion

Source: International Recording Media Association

The main use of the blank video tape is the consumer's use to record televison programs. It is anticipated
that there would be a large drop in the sales of this tape if pay-per-view television shows carried copy
protection. It is estimated that a very large share of the users of video cassette recorders do so for time
shifting of viewing programs.

Blank VideoTapes (VHS Format T-120 equivalent units) (World)

1997 - 1,485 million

1998 - 1,446 million
1999 - 1,463 million
2000 - 1400 million
2001 - 1,275 million

Source: International Recording Media Association

Another view of the blank video market came from British research firm Understanding & Solutions. Their
prediction was for 1.147 billion blank videocassettes in 1999 compared to 1.146 in 1998.

The stock of videotape in 1997 was estimated at about 4.6 billion by Richard Kelly, Cambridge
Associates.It is not clear whether this is referring to all videos, including those sold blank, or just
prerecorded. Further, it is not specified whether this estimate is solely for the United States or includes
the whole world. (Feb. 1997 Newsletter, IRMA) We have taken this estimate into account but not used it
directly because it seems that the flow of new videotapes worldwide each year would yield a considerably
higher figure, even assuming a lot of videotapes may be viewed as disposable after a few years. We
have instead estimated a world stock of videotape of all format at around 10 billion.

Conversion

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Magnetic Details
Audio Conversion Issues

In translating the vast quantity of audio information available on cassette tape into its digital equivalent,
we have chosen to use the CD format, linear PCM audio at a 16-bit word length and 44.1kHz sample
rate. Although, professional recording studios use a sampling rate of 96kHz, the vast majority of tape
recorded audio material is music for consumer use and the CD format is the digital format of choice for
this application. The amount of data generated by this format is easily calculated. There are 44,100 16-bit
samples taken each second for two tracks. Thus,1.4 million bits per second and 5.08 gigabits per hour
are generated. The conversion to bytes yields 605 mBs per hour. (1 mByte = 1,048,576 bytes). This data
is not compressed and yields a reasonable representation of music for most people.

Video Conversion Issues

In making assumptions about the size of analog videotape stores we have chosen to make conversions
assuming the use of MPEG-2 video compression standard. In the case of videotape, the use of this
conversion factor is seen as appropriate because it was designed as a generic format for digital
multimedia and includes coding schema for both video and audio.

In the case of video, the massive amount of data generated requires that for any practical purpose some
compression scheme must be used. MPEG-2 is now the international standard for video storage.
Compression is achieved in two ways: spatial compression and temporal compression. The spatial
compression is achieved by reducing the number of bits used to represent a single frame. Temporal
compression, where the bulk of the savings come, attempts to encode only the bits that represent the
portions of a frame that have changed from the previous frame.

The actual amount of compression that can be achieved with MPEG-2 varies quite a bit, we have
assumed that 2 gigabytes is adequate to represent 1 hour of high-fidelity audio and high-definition video
data.

References and Resources

Gibson, G.D. (1994): Audio, Film and Video Survey. A report on an international survey of 500 audio,
motion picture film and video archives. Library of Congress, Washington DC.

Moving Pictures Expert Group

© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Web Details

■ "A Cyveillance Study: Sizing the Internet" Summarized

■ "The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value" Summarized
■ Excel Spreadsheet with further information.

"Sizing the Internet: A Cyveillance Study"

Source: Cyveillance, 10-July-2000
■ 2.1 billion unique, publicly accessible web pages, and about 4 billion by early 2001 if the
current rate of growth continues;
■ 7.3 million uniques ages added per day;
■ Average page size: 10,060 bytes;
■ Average number of images on page: 14.38 (median);
■ Percentage of US vs. international pages: 84.7%/15.37%
■ Internet still continues to grow at accelerating rate;

"The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value"

Source: BrightPlanet LLC, July 2000
■ The deep Web contains 7,500 tarabytes of information, compared to 19 terabytes of
information in the surface Web;
■ The deep Web contains nearly 550 billion individual documents compared to the 1 billion of
the surface Web;
■ 60 of the largest web sites contain about 750 terabytes of information;
■ More than half of the deep Web content resides in topic specific databases;
■ Average page size on the surface Web is 18.7 kbytes, while on the deep Web - 13.7 kbytes,
and median for the deep Web is 19.7 kbytes;
■ Average deep Web site has a Web-expressed (HTML included basis) database size of 74.4
megabytes, and a median of 169 kbytes;

More Information

Excel Spreadsheet: rawdata.xls

HTML Created from Excel Spreadsheet: click here. [202K]

© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Internet Growth Data

Source: Hobbes' Internet Timeline

URL:
http://info.isoc.org/guest/zakon/Internet/History/HIT.html

Date Hosts Date Hosts Networks Domains

Dec-69 4 Jul-89 130,000 650 3,900
Jun-70 9 Oct-89 159,000 837
Oct-70 11 Oct-90 313,000 2,063 9,300
Dec-70 13 Jan-91 376,000 2,338
Apr-71 23 Jul-91 535,000 3,086 16,000
Oct-72 31 Oct-91 617,000 3,556 18,000
Jan-73 35 Jan-92 727,000 4,526
Jun-74 62 Apr-92 890,000 5,291 20,000
Mar-77 111 Jul-92 992,000 6,569 16,300
Dec-79 188 Oct-92 1,136,000 7,505 18,100
Aug-81 213 Jan-93 1,313,000 8,258 21,000
May-82 235 Apr-93 1,486,000 9,722 22,000
Aug-83 562 Jul-93 1,776,000 13,767 26,000
Oct-84 1,024 Oct-93 2,056,000 16,533 28,000
Oct-85 1,961 Jan-94 2,217,000 20,539 30,000
Feb-86 2,308 Jul-94 3,212,000 25,210 46,000
Nov-86 5,089 Oct-94 3,864,000 37,022 56,000
Dec-87 28,174 Jan-95 4,852,000 39,410 71,000
Jul-88 33,000 Jul-95 6,642,000 61,538 120,000
Oct-88 56,000 Jan-96 9,472,000 93,671 240,000
Jan-89 80,000 Jul-96 12,881,000 134,365 488,000
Jan-97 16,146,000 828,000
Jul-97 19,540,000 1,301,000

Notes: Hosts = a computer system with registered IP address;

Domain = registered domain name (with name server
record)

A more accurate survey mechanism was produced in 1999, new and corrected numbers are shown
below:

Date Hosts Date Hosts Date Hosts

Jan-95 5,846,000 Jan-97 21,819,000 Jan-9943,230,000
Jul-95 8,200,000 Jul-97 26,053,000 Jul-9956,218,000
Jan-96 14,352,000 Jan-98 29,670,000 Jan-0072,398,092
Jul-96 16,729,000 Jul-98 36,739,000

Note: the original source for the data above is: Network Wizards Internet Domain
Survey

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URL: ftp://ftp.nw.com/pub/zone/WWW-9807/top.html

This statistics is also reproduced at the following locations:

1. Internet Statistics: Growth and Usage of the Web and the Internet
URL: http://www.mit.edu/people/mkgray/net/
2. Internet Software Consortsium: Internet Domain Survey
URL: http://www.isc.org/ds/

Source: The NSFNET Backbone Project,

1987-1995
URL:
ftp://nic.merit.edu/statistics/nsfnet/index.html

Date Networks Date Networks Date Networks

Jul-88 217 Nov-90 2125 Mar-93 10498
Aug-88 241 Dec-90 2190 Apr-93 11252
Sep-88 292 Jan-91 2338 May-93 12349
Oct-88 305 Feb-91 2417 Jun-93 13170
Nov-88 334 Mar-91 2501 Jul-93 14121
Dec-88 346 Apr-91 2622 Aug-93 15160
Jan-89 384 May-91 2763 Sep-93 16696
Feb-89 410 Jun-91 2982 Oct-93 17979
Mar-89 467 Jul-91 3086 Nov-93 19664
Apr-89 516 Aug-91 3258 Dec-93 21430
May-89 564 Sep-91 3389 Jan-94 23494
Jun-89 603 Oct-91 3556 Feb-94 25706
Jul-89 650 Nov-91 3751 Mar-94 28578
Aug-89 745 Dec-91 4305 Apr-94 30626
Sep-89 809 Jan-92 4526 May-94 32370
Oct-89 837 Feb-92 4740 Jun-94 34051
Nov-89 897 Mar-92 4976 Jul-94 36153
Dec-89 927 Apr-92 5291 Aug-94 38307
Jan-90 1233 May-92 5515 Sep-94 39977
Feb-90 1290 Jun-92 5739 Oct-94 41520
Mar-90 1356 Jul-92 6031 Nov-94 42883
Apr-90 1525 Aug-92 6385 Dec-94 44689
May-90 1580 Sep-92 6640 Jan-95 46318
Jun-90 1639 Oct-92 7354 Feb-95 48514
Jul-90 1727 Nov-92 7854 Mar-95 50344
Aug-90 1894 Dec-92 8561 Apr-95 50766
Sep-90 1988 Jan-93 9117
Oct-90 2063 Feb-93 9604

Date Hosts Date Domains

Aug-81 213 Jul-88 900

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 Aug-83 562 Jul-89 3,900
Oct-85 1,961 Oct-90 9,300
Dec-87 28,174 Jul-91 16,000
Oct-89 159,000 Oct-92 18,100
Oct-90 313,000 Oct-93 28,000
Oct-91 617,000 Oct-94 56,000
Oct-92 1,136,000 Jul-95 120,000
Oct-93 2,056,000 Jul-96 488,000
Oct-94 3,864,000 Jul-97 1,301,000
Jul-95 6,642,000
Jul-96 12,881,000
Jul-97 19,540,000

Source: NetSizer
URL: http://www.netsizer.com/

Estimate of the number of web hosts (As of Jul 21, 2000): 86.437
millions

Source: Domain Stats

URL: http://www.domainstats.com/

Total domains registered worldwide (As of Jul 21, 2000): 17,804,717

Source: Center for Next Generation Internet

URL:
http://www.ngi.org/trends.htm

Annual hosts growth rate: 63%

100 million hosts by the end of
Predictions:
2000
1 billion hosts by 2005
69 new hosts per
Expansion:
minute
23 new domains per minute
Contains detailed statistics by
country

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WWW Growth Data

Source: Hobbes' Internet Timeline

URL:
http://info.isoc.org/guest/zakon/Internet/History/HIT.html

Date Sites Date Sites Date Sites

Jun-93 130 May-97 1,044,163 Dec-98 3,689,227
Sep-93 204 Jun-97 1,117,255 Jan-99 4,062,280
Oct-93 228 Jul-97 1,203,096 Feb-99 4,301,512
Dec-93 623 Aug-97 1,269,800 Mar-99 4,389,131
Jun-94 2,738 Sep-97 1,364,714 Apr-99 5,040,663
Dec-94 10,022 Oct-97 1,466,906 May-99 5,414,325
Jun-95 23,500 Nov-97 1,553,998 Jun-99 6,177,453
Jan-96 100,000 Dec-97 1,681,868 Jul-99 6,598,697
Jun-96 252,000 Jan-98 1,834,710 Aug-99 7,078,194
Jul-96 299,403 Feb-98 1,920,933 Sep-99 7,370,929
Aug-96 342,081 Mar-98 2,084,473 Oct-99 8,115,828
Sep-96 397,281 Apr-98 2,215,195 Nov-99 8,844,573
Oct-96 462,047 May-98 2,308,502 Dec-99 9,560,866
Nov-96 525,906 Jun-98 2,410,067 Jan-00 9,950,491
Dec-96 603,367 Jul-98 2,594,622 Feb-0011,161,811
Jan-97 646,162 Aug-98 2,807,588 Mar-0013,106,190
Feb-97 739,688 Sep-98 3,156,324 Apr-0014,322,950
Mar-97 883,149 Oct-98 3,358,969 May-0015,049,382
Apr-97 1,002,512 Nov-98 3,518,158 Jun-0017,119,262

Source: article "Accessibility of Information on the Web"

URL: n/a, only a printed copy is available

Note: all numbers below refer to publicly indexable web pages; publicly indexable web pages exclude pages
that are not normally considered for indexing by web search engines, such as pages with authorization
requirements(including firewalls), pages excluded from indexing using the robots exclusion standard,
dynamic pages, etc;

at least 320 million

December, 1997:
pages;

February, 1999: 2.8 million servers on the publicly indexable web;

289 average pages per server;
800 million publicly indexable web pages;
18.7 kilobytes is the mean size of a page;

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 3.9 kbytes is the median size of a page;
February, 1999, 7.3 - kbytes average size of the textual content [after removing HTML
continued: tags, comments, and extra white space];
0.98 kbytes - median size of the textual content;
15 terabytes of pages is the amount of data on the publicly indexable
web;
6 terabytes is the amount of text
data;
62.8 images per web server;
15.2 kbytes - average image size;
5.5 kbytes - median image size;
180 million images on the publicly indexable web;
3 terabytes - total amount of image data;

Note: the distribution of pages on web servers is extremely skewed, following a universal power law; many
sites have few pages, and a few sites have vast numbers of pages, which limits the accuracy of the estimates
above; the true value could be higher because of very rare sites that have millions of pages (for example,
GeoCities reportedly has 34 million pages), or because some sites could not be crawled completely because
of errors;

Source: "Size of the Web: A Dynamic Essay for a Dynamic Medium"

URL:
http://censorware.org/web_size/

As of 7/5/2000, the Web has

2,170,000,000 pages;
roughly:
40,800,000,000,000 bytes of text;
489,000,000 images;
8,160,000,000,000 bytes of image
data.

In the last 24 hours, the Web has added: 4,420,000 new pages;
82,800,000,000 new bytes of text;
994,000 new images; and
16,600,000,000 new bytes of image
data.
49,400,000 pages changed; and
11,100,000 images changed.

Average lifespan of the Web page: 44 days;

Source: "The Truth About the Web Crawling Towards Eternity"

URL:
www.alexa.com/company/internet_stats.html

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Note: Published in Web Techniques Magazine, May 1997,
Issue 5

How many Web sites are there?

One million Web-site names are in common usage.
There are about 450,000 unique host machines.
If you request the top page from these 450,000, about 300,000 will return one within reasonable
time. The rest appear to be intermittent or archaic.
About 95 percent of the 300,000 servers are "up" at any given time.

How big is the Web?

Note: "We estimate there are 80 million HTML pages on the public Web as of January 1997. The figure is
fuzzy because some sites are entirely dynamic (a database generates pages in response to clicks or queries).
The typical Web page has 15 links (HREFs) to other pages or objects and five sourced objects (SRC), such as
sounds or images." Moreover:

The typical HTML page is 5

kbytes;
The typical image (GIF or JPEG) is 12 kbytes;
The average object served via HTTP is 15
kbytes;
The typical Web site is about 20 percent HTML, 80 percent images, sounds, and executables (by
size in bytes);

"The upshot of this data is that it takes about 400 GB to store the text of a snapshot of the public Web and
about 2000 GB (2 TB) to store nontext files."

How big are individual Web sites?

The median size for a Web site is about 300 pages; only 50 sites have more than 30,000 pages.
About 5 percent of all servers have a robot.txt file (for governing how crawlers visit).
About 1 percent of all servers have a sitelist.txt file (to aid site mapping and robot revisiting).

How fast is the Web growing?

The size of the Web is doubling yearly, but this statistic is losing its meaning because of the
growth of dynamic sites.
The typical Web page is only about two months old.
Dynamic sites are becoming a significant presence; JavaScript is widespread, Java much less so,
but growing.

Note: "Facts above are mostly based on data gathered by Internet Archive, but augmented with some stats
from Larry Page of Stanford University and public documents from the Web."
Author: Z Smith

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Source: Measuring the Web
URL: http://www5conf.inria.fr/fich_html/papers/P9/Overview.html

What is the "average page" like? (as of May,

1996)
Mean size: 6518
Median size: 2021
SD: 31678

Source: "The Web: Growing by 2 Million Pages a Day"

URL:
www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,12329,00.html
Author: David Lake
Published in: The Industry Standard Magazine, February
28, 2000

Estimated Growth per Day

Metric 1999 Total
1998-1999
Web pages 1,500,000,000 1,917,808
Hosts 72,398,092 79,913
Domain Names 8,100,000 12,981
Unique Web Sites 3,649,000 4,422

Cumulative Domain Name Registrations in the .com, .net, .org Domains

(Millions)
Year Existing New
1993 0 0.01
1994 0.01 0.03
1995 0.04 0.16
1996 0.2 0.4
1997 0.6 0.9
1998 1.6 1.8
1999 3.4 4.7

Web Site Growth Trend (Millions)

Online Computer
Year Alexa Internet
Library Center
1997 1.2n/a
1998 2 2.5
1999 3.6 3.4
2000 n/a n/a
2001 n/a 10

Number of Hosts in the Domain Name System (Millions)

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 Year Number of Hosts
1995 5.8
1996 14.4
1997 21.8
1998 29.7
1999 43.2
2000 72.4

Source: Inktomi Corp: Web Surpasses One Billion

Documents
URL:
http://www.inktomi.com/new/press/billion.html

Jan 18, 2000: Inktomi announces that WWW surpassed 1 billion pages; This figure also coincides with
Internet Archive's (www.archive.org) estimate. Internet Archive also says that these 1 billion pages
correspond to 13.8 terabytes of text-only data, with a rate of growth 2 terabytes per month;

Source: Online Computer Library Center June 1999 Web Statistics

URL:
http://www.oclc.org/oclc/research/projects/webstats/statistics.htm

Number of IP addresses in 32-bit address

4,294,967,296
space:
Number of IP addresses in the 0,1% random sample: 4,294,967
4,882,000 (+/-
Number of Web Sites:
3%)
3,649,000 (+/-
Number of Unique Web Sites:
3%)
2,229,000 (+/-
Number of Public Web Sites:
4%)
389,000 (+/-
Number of Private Web Sites:
10%)
1,031,000 (+/-
Number of Provisional Web Sites:
6%)
288,221,000
Number of Web Pages:
(+/- 35%)
Number of Files: 500,491,000

Web Growth
1997 1998 1999
Web Sites: 1,570,000 2,851,000 4,882,000
Unique Sites: 1,230,000 2,035,000 3,649,000
Unique Public Sites: 800,000 1,457,000 2,229,000
% Change: 97 to 98 98 to 99 97 to 99

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Web Sites: 82 71 211
Unique Sites: 65 79 197
Unique Public Sites: 82 53 179

Web Volatility: 44%

(IP addresses identifying a Web site in 1998 that no longer identify a Web site in 1999)

Explanation of the Statistics

The 32-bit Internet Protocol address space consists of 4,294,967,296 unique IP addresses. A 0.1% random
sample (without replacement) was taken from this address space, resulting in 4,294,967 unique IP addresses.
An attempt was made to connect to each of the sample addresses on Port 80.

Web Site
Identified by an IP address that returns a response code of 200 and a Web page in reply to an HTTP request
for the home page.

Unique Web Sites

It is not uncommon for the same Web site to be duplicated at multiple IP addresses (e.g., for server load
distribution purposes). To ensure that each unique Web site has the same probability of being selected for the
sample, the following rule was followed: if a site is located at multiple IP addresses, the site is retained in the
sample only if the numerically lowest IP address is in the sample. Three diagnostic tests were developed to
assist in identifying sites with multiple IP addresses. A description of these tests is available in the paper A
Methodology for Sampling the World Wide Web.

Public Web Sites

A public Web site offers content that, from a general perspective, is meaningful and non-trivial, and is freely
accessible without fee payment or prior authorization.

Private Web Sites

A private Web site requires payment or prior authorization to access its content; typically, a private site will
not permit free access beyond its home page.

Provisional Web Sites

A provisional Web site is in a transitory or unfinished state, and/or offers only content that from a general
perspective, is meaningless or trivial.

Web Pages
According to the W3C Working Draft "Web Terminology & Definitions Sheet" (May 24, 1999), a Web page
is defined as:
A collection of information, consisting of one or more Web resources, intended to be rendered
simultaneously, and identified by a single URI. More specifically, a Web page consists of a Web resource
with zero, one, or more embedded Web resources intended to be rendered as a single unit, and referred to by
the URI of the one Web resource which is not embedded.
The key point in this definition is that a Web page often is a composite object, consisting of multiple Web
resources: e.g., text, images, applets, etc. The Web page is the single entity representing the combination of

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these resources.

For each unique public Web site, a harvesting agent was used to download and store all text-based files
internal to the site. Harvested files had one of the following extensions:

.asc .asp .dhtm .dhtml

.ephtm .ephtml .htm .html
.jsp .mhtm .mhtml .php
.php3 .phtm .phtml .shtm
.shtml .text .tx8 .txt

In addition, files with no extension and those identified implicitly in the URL - i.e., URLs whose path ends
with a directory, and the server automatically loads the correct file when the URL is accessed - were also
harvested.
Duplicate pages on the same site were eliminated. Elimination of duplicate pages was conducted strictly on
an intra-site basis, and was not extended across sites.
Once the de-duping process was completed, the remaining files were processed by software that counted the
number of Web pages present on each Web site. For a given Web site, Web pages fell into one of two
categories:
1. the harvested pages
2. references in the harvested pages to other Web pages internal to the Web site, through the HTML <a
href="..."> convention.

The counting algorithm was configured so that a Web page with frames is counted only once, rather than
multiple times for each constituent part of the frame.

Number of Files
An estimate of the number of files located at public Web sites can also be obtained from the harvest data. For
each public Web site, files were identified as one of the following:
1. harvested files
2. references in the harvested files to other files internal to the Web site, through the HTML <a href="...">
convention.
3. references in the harvested files to images internal to the Web site, through the HTML <img src="...">
convention.
4. references in the harvested files to applets internal to the Web site, through the HTML <applet code="..."
codebase="..."> convention.

Source: Cyveillance's "Sizing the Internet"

URL: http://www.cyveillance.com/resources/Sizing_the_Internet_whitepaper.pdf

Number of unique pages on

2.1 billion
Internet:
Unique pages added per day: 7.3 million

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 10,060
Average size of pages:
bytes
Average number of images on a
14.38
page:

Source: Cyveillance Corp.

URL: http://www.cyveillance.com/resources/facts.asp#5

Web grows by 300,000 pages every 5 days (Original source: Lycos)

The amount of Web pages is estimated to grow seven-fold to 7.7 billion by 2002.
(Source: IDC)

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Email Details

■ "Email Growth Hogs Enterprise Resources" Summarized

■ "AOL Per-User Email Figures Climb 60 Percent in 1999" Summarized
■ "Messaging Today: Worldwide Trends" Summarized
■ 24/7 Media: Email Facts
■ Nov. 92 - Nov. 94 Messaging Statistics
■ Junk Email Statistics
■ Other Information
■ Final Thoughts

"E-Mail Growth Hogs Enterprise Resources"

Source: Network World Magazine, 31-Jan-2000
■ Study of corporate email usage, citing David Ferris, president of Ferris Research;
■ Average number of messages received by end users is expected to jump 81% to 34 per day
by the beginning of 2001;
■ Average size of a message is expected to increase 192% to 286 kbytes by the beginning of
2001 [with growth attributable to attachments];
■ There are nearly 170 million corporate email boxes worldwide, more than three times the
number of boxes five years ago, according to Eric Arnum, editor of "Messaging Online";
■ There are approximately 440 million corporate and personal mailboxes worldwide

"AOL Per-User Email Figures Climb 60 Percent in 1999"

Source: "Messaging Online," 4-Feb-2000
■ 3.5 messages per AOL user per day in 1998, and 5.6 in 1999;
■ 110 messages sent in 1999, up from 50 million in 1998;
■ 20.5 million users at the end of 1999
■ Email usage per person increased 60 percent in 1999;
■ "If you believe every person in the U.S. has an email account (and it's beginnign to seem that
way), then you are talking 1.54 billion messages per day, or 560 billion messages per year. If
you believe half the population has email, then your numbers are 770 million messages per
day or 280 billion messages per year. Adjust those numbers to reflect heavier usage by the
workforce email users and lighter usage by Webmail and ISP users, and you possibly could
come up with a trillion messages per year."
■ In 1999, the U.S. Postal Service delivered over 200 billion pieces of mail, so email volume
now outpaces postal mail volumes;

"Messaging Today: Worldwide Trends"

Source: "Messaging Online," 14-Mar-2000

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Email Details
■ The total number of electronic mailboxes in the world has soared 83.5 percent in the past
year to 569,171,660 mailboxes;
■ In the U.S., the number of mailboxes has jumped 73 percent to 333.5 million mailboxes since
the end of 1998. In the rest of the world, the total number of mailboxes has grown 101
percent to 235.6 million mailboxes in the past year;
■ In the U.S., the average corporate email user has around 1.5 mailboxes, and the average
household using email has about 4 mailboxes.
■ There are about 89 million Americans using email at work and roughly 50 million households
using email
■ There are probably 110 million Americans using email at home or at work, 40 percent of the
population.
■ There are fewer than one billion televisions in the world, fewer than 800 million phone lines,
and 569.2 million mailboxes;
■ This paper contains other interesting information and graphs. Here are two samples::

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Email Details

24/7 Media: Email Facts

Source: 24/7 Media
■ Opt-in email volume will jump 52.3% to 61.1 billion by year-end 2000, and reach 240 billion
messages by 2003.
■ There were 78 million active e-mail users, aged 13 and older, in the U.S. at year-end 1999,
accounting for 35% of the total U.S. population of adults and teens (13+)
■ By year-end 2002, there will be 135 million e-mail users, representing 59% of the overall U.S.
population of adults and teens. (Source: Emarketer)
■ There were 409 million e-mail boxes worldwide in 1999, up from 234 million a year earlier. In
1999, an estimated 20% of all e-mail received in the U.S. was commercial, split almost
evenly between spam and permission e-mail (Source: Emarketer)

Nov. 92 - Nov. 94 - Messages Per Month

Source: Internet Society

Month # of Messages
Nov. 92 279,060,000
Dec. 92 262,320,000
Jan. 93 286,920,000
Feb. 93 317,616,667
Mar. 93 363,180,000
Apr. 93 352,410,000
May 93 410,700,000

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Email Details

Jun. 93 371,700,000
Jul. 93 383,340,000
Aug. 93 397,860,000
Sep. 93 421,320,000
Oct. 93 479,853,333
Nov. 93 508,980,000
Dec. 93 469,370,000
Jan. 94 516,540,000
Feb. 94 527,170,000
Mar. 94 636,140,000
Apr. 94 695,220,000
May 94 731,220,000
Jun. 94 747,960,000
Jul. 94 765,840,000
Aug. 94 803,100,000
Sep. 94 899,400,000
Oct. 94 1,033,920,000
Nov. 94 1,007,590,000

Junk Email
■ "Is the Junk Mail Problem Disappearing?" contains different numbers and time-series
analysis of the junk email.

Other Information
■ Mail.com has 14.4 million e-mail boxes, which require 27 terabytes of storage.
Source: Network World, Network Storage White Paper
■ 300 million e-mails are sent per day in the US.
Source: Thomas Staffing of California
■ Today's users send about 15 messages a day and receive about 20 a day, on average. This
colume is expected to grow by some 60% and 80% respectively over the next year.
Source: Ferris Research
■ Electronic mailboxes will more than double in the next two years to an estimated 112 million
in 1999.
Source: Electronic Mail & Messaging Systems
■ UC Berkeley's average message size in August, 2000 was 18,517 bytes, with median size of
1863 bytes.

Final Thoughts

Based on the information above, 500 to 600 billion email messages in 2000 seems to be a
reasonable non-inflated estimate [though it might be lower than the actual number]. While the
average size of email message is hard to tell, we can predict the volume of storage needed from the
data above. For example, Mail.com uses 27 terabytes of storage space for its 14.4 million email

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Email Details
boxes, and the number of email boxes can be estimated to be between 450 and 500 million. With
the average of 475 million email boxes in 2000, the volume of storage needed can be estimated at
900 terabytes, which is lower than the number obtained by multiplying the number of messages by
their [probable] average size. The explanation may be that this is the amount of messages stored,
not the measure of flow.

© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Powers of Ten

Many of the following facts were taken from Roy Williams "Data Powers of Ten" page at Caltech.

■ Byte [ 8 bits]
● 0.1 bytes: a binary decision;
● 1 byte: a single character;
● 10 bytes: a single word;
● 100 bytes: a telegram ORr a punched card;
■ Kilobyte [ 1,000 bytes OR 103 bytes]
● 1 Kilobyte: A very short story;
● 2 Kilobytes: A tTypewritten page;
● 10 Kilobytes: An encyclopaedic page OR a deck of punched cards;
● 10 Kilobytes: static web page;
● 50 Kilobytes: A compressed document image page;
● 100 Kilobytes: A low-resolution photograph;
● 200 Kilobytes: A box of punched cards;
● 500 Kilobytes: A very heavy box of punched cards;
■ Megabyte [ 1,000,000 bytes OR 106 bytes]
● 1 Megabyte: A small novel OR a 3.5 inch floppy disk;
● 2 Megabytes: A high resolution photograph;
● 5 Megabytes: The complete works of Shakespeare OR 30 seconds of TV-quality
video;
● 10 Megabytes: A minute of high-fidelity sound OR a digital chest X-ray;
● 20 Megabytes: A box of floppy disks;
● 50 Megabytes: A digital mammogram;
● 100 Megabytes: 1 meter of shelved books OR a two-volume encyclopaedic book;
● 200 Megabytes: A reel of 9-track tape OR an IBM 3480 cartridge tape;
● 500 Megabytes: A CD-ROM OR the hard disk of a PC;
■ Gigabyte [ 1,000,000,000 bytes OR 109 bytes]
● 1 Gigabyte: a pickup truck filled with paper OR a symphony in high-fidelity sound OR a
movie at TV quality;
● 2 Gigabytes: 20 meters of shelved books OR a stack of 9-track tapes;
● 5 Gigabytes: 8mm Exabyte tape;
● 20 Gigabytes: A good collection of the works of Beethoven OR 5 Exabyte tapes OR a
VHS tape used for digital data;
● 50 Gigabytes: A floor of books OR hundreds of 9-track tapes;
● 100 Gigabytes: A floor of academic journals OR a large ID-1 digital tape;
● 200 Gigabytes: 50 Exabyte tapes;

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Powers of Ten

● 500 Gigabytes: The biggest FTP site.

■ Terabyte [ 1,000,000,000,000 bytes OR 1012 bytes]
● 1 Terabyte: An automated tape robot OR all the X-ray films in a large technological
hospital OR 50000 trees made into paper and printed OR daily rate of EOS data
(1998);
● 2 Terabytes: An academic research library OR a cabinet full of Exabyte tapes;
● 10 Terabytes: The printed collection of the US Library of Congress;
● 50 Terabytes: The contents of a large Mass Storage System;
● 400 Terabytes: National Climactic Data Center (NOAA) database;
■ Petabyte [ 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes OR 1015 bytes]
● 1 Petabyte: 3 years of EOS data (2001);
● 2 Petabytes: All US academic research libraries;
● 8 Petabytes: All information available on the Web;
● 20 Petabytes: Production of hard-disk drives in 1995;
● 200 Petabytes: All printed material OR production of digital magnetic tape in 1995;
■ Exabyte [ 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes OR 1018 bytes]
● 2 Exabytes: Total volume of information generated worldwide annually.
● 5 Exabytes: All words ever spoken by human beings.
■ Zettabyte [ 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes OR 1021 bytes]
■ Yottabyte [ 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes OR 1024 bytes]

© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Print Details

■ Conversion Factors
■ Originals
● Books
❍ Conversion Factors
❍ Flow
❍ Stock
❍ Rate of Change
● Newspapers
❍ Conversion Factors
❍ Flow
❍ Stock
❍ Rate of Change
● Periodicals
❍ Conversion Factors
❍ World
❍ United States
● Office Documents
❍ Conversion Factors
❍ Flow
❍ Stock
❍ Rate of Change
● Visual Materials
❍ Conversion Factors
❍ Flow
❍ Stock
■ Copies
■ Fun Facts About Print Media
■ Print Media Bibliography
■ Supporting Charts

Conversion Factors

To estimate the storage requirements for these non-digital information sources, one must make

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Print Details
some assumptions about the form in which they will be stored and the degree to which they will be
compressed. There is considerable variation in the "bytes per page" proposed by various sources,
partly because of differing assumptions about the content (e.g. ratio of text to pictures), formatting
(e.g. number of characters per page, amount of white space), and file storage method (e.g. whether
converted to a text or compressed document image file). Here is a sample of the range:
● According to Webopoedia: "A disk that can hold 1.44 megabytes, for example, is capable of
storing approximately 1.4 million characters, or about 3,000 pages of information." 1.44 MB =
1,509,949 bytes = 3,000 pages = 503 bytes per page
● According to Horison Information Strategies: 2,400 bytes (2.3 KB) for one page of paper. 300
- 500 MB for large encyclopedia
● According to Michael Lesk: 5,000 bytes (about 5 KB) per page (Source: "How Much
Information is There in the World?", 1997)
● 30 - 50 KB for a page of mathematical text in bitmap form (Source: Andrew Odlyzko, "Tragic
loss or good riddance? The impending demise of traditional scholarly journals," 1994)
● According to Roy Williams of CalTech, "Data Powers of Ten": 10 KB per encyclopedic (small
font, dense formatting) page, 50 KB for a compressed document image page
● According to ArchiveBuilders.com 50 KB for one scanned page but 800 KB for one scanned
engineering drawing
● According to JSTOR, a digital library of scholarly journals, one scanned document page is
130 KB; compressed using Cartesian Perceptual Compression (CPC) a page is only 26 KB.
● According to Internet Archive: 1 MB for one mystery novel. 1 copy of Encyclopedia Brittanica
= 1 gigabyte (2,619 pages per copy so 409,981 bytes or about 400 KB per page)
To demonstrate this range, for our estimates, we will use three different numbers: one for a scanned
image (uncompressed, at archival quality - 600 dpi), one for a compressed image file, and one for
and ASCII (or plain text) file. For the summary statements, will use the mid-range number, as most
documents are scanned with some measure of compression. We opted to use Cartesian Perceptual
Compression (CPC) as our compression standard because although it is a lossy algorithm, it is
"non-degrading" - the human eye can't determine any difference. And it keeps the full 600 dpi
resolution.

Originals

Books

Conversion Factors

To estimate the size (in bytes) of all books published in the world, use the following formula:

Average number of pages per book * Average file size per page * Number of books published per
year.

Table 1: Books Conversion Factors

Average # of Storage Format Average File Size Conversion
Pages per Item Factor
(rounded)
Scanned TIFF (600 dpi) 130 KB 40 MB/Item
300 Compressed 26 KB 8 MB/item
Plain text 2.5 KB 1 MB/Item

Flow

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World

Worldwide, in 1996 there were 808,066 titles published, according to UNESCO's Statistical
Yearbook 1998, as cited in The Bowker Library and Trade Almanac. This is roughly equivalent to 7
TB/year. The editor of the Almanac notes problems with UNESCO's data-gathering--inconsistencies
in reporting, data collection lags, and missing data; nonetheless, the editor acknowledges that
UNESCO provides researchers the best and most usable overview of international book title output.
If one includes the most recently available title production figures for countries that did not show
1996 data (such as China, France, and the Netherlands), the annual world total increases to
968,735 - about 8 TB/year. This number is still not quite accurate because there are still about 70
countries of the world not documented by UNESCO. However, it is the best available estimate we
were able to locate.

United States

In 1997, about 64,711 books were published in the United States, according to the U.S. Census
Bureau's 1999 Statistical Abstract of the United States. The Bowker Annual Library and Book Trade
Almanac provides a similar figure for 1997 (65,796 titles) and notes that this is a decrease from
1996's all-time high figure of 68,175 titles. The preliminary estimate for 1998 suggested another
decrease, to 56,129 books, roughly equivalent to .5 TB per year.

Stock

World

To estimate the international stock of books currently available for purchase, we note that the United
States produces about 40% of the world's printed material. (Source: US Industry and Trade Outlook
2000) The national library and copyright repository of the United States--the Library of Congress--
contains about 26 million books. Therefore, using the 40% rule of thumb, the world stock of books
might be approximately 65 million titles.

United States

Books In Print is an authoritative source for books published and/or distributed in the United States.
The 1999-2000 edition of Books in Print (with supplement) includes 1,663,815 books - about 13 TB
in all. (This number does not include: books not published and/or not distributed in the U.S.; books
not available to the trade or general public; free books not included with a title for sale; unbound
material, pamphlets and booklets; periodicals and serials; books only available to members of an
organization; subscription-only material, and music manuscripts, sheet music, and librettos.)
According to a press release from January 2000, booksinprint.com 2000 includes 3.2 million titles -
about 26 TB total. (Of these, about 500,000 titles are out-of-print.) This figure is consistent with
online booksellers: Barnes & Noble.com asserts that it has 3 million titles available while Amazon
claims to have 4.5 million titles. Source: Wall Street Journal, July 17, 2000, "A New Chapter:
Independent Booksellers Hope to Find Strength in Numbers" by Scott Eden.

Rate of change

The number of titles published each year in the United States and internationally has risen gradually
and fairly consistently over the last 10 years, apart from a slight downturn in US title production in
1997.

Newspapers

Conversion Factors

A large metropolitan daily US newspaper will run approximately 60 pages each day, and may vary
from 48 to 72 pages. Therefore one year of a large US newspaper would consist of about 21,900
pages per year. To account for the smaller regional papers and those which are not published daily,
we opted to use 30 for the average number of pages, which results in 10,950 pages per year.

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A double truck (center fold) full broadsheet is 24 in X 36 in. Because a newspaper page would be
scanned at higher resolution and contains detailed graphics, a double - truck would require about 1
Megabyte (uncompressed) and a single full broadsheet page (18 X 24 inches) would require about
.5 MB.

Table 2: Newspapers Conversion Factors

Average Storage Format Average File Size (per Conversion
Number of page) Factor
Pages per Year (rounded)
Scanned TIFF (600 dpi) 500 KB 5475
MB/item

10,950 Compressed 100 KB 1095

MB/item
Plain text 10 KB 110
MB/item

Flow

World

The number of newspapers in the world as of 1999 is 22,643, according to the International
Standard Serial Number Register. UNESCO's Statistical yearbook from 1996 offers a different,
much smaller figure: 8,391. The discrepancy is due largely to the fact that multiple ISSNs may be
assigned to what is essentially the same information product if it exists in two different formats
(paper, online, floppy disk, CD-ROM, microform). For example, the New York Times print version
and NYT online have two different ISSNs. Other differences may be attributed to the fact that
UNESCO's excludes non-daily newspapers from its statistics or that the UNESCO data set is less
complete than that of ISSN.

Using the ISSN figure and the compressed format:

.1MB/page * 10,950 pages/year * 22,643 newspapers/world = 124 TB/year

United States

According to the Newspaper Association of America, there were 1,489 daily newspapers and 897
Sunday - only newspapers published in the United States in 1999.

Stock

The Library of Congress provides useful statistics on the nationwide stock of printed periodicals and
newspapers. Most library print periodical holdings have been transferred to microfilm, microfiche, or
simply made accessible online, through efforts such as the National Endowment for the Humanities'
Newspaper Project. However, bound periodicals do still exist at the LOC: about 30,570 newspapers
and 557,738 serials.

Rate of Change

The number of newspaper titles and the circulation figures have both declined slowly over the past
10 years.

Periodicals

Conversion Factors

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Table 3: Periodicals Conversion Factors

Periodical Type Average # of Storage Format Average File Conversion
Pages per Item Size (per page) Factor
(annual total) (rounded)
Scanned TIFF 130 KB 225
(600 dpi) MB/item
Scholarly
1,723
Journal Compressed 26 KB 45 MB/item
Plain text 2.5 KB 4 MB/item
Scanned TIFF 130 KB 650
(600 dpi) MB/item
Mass-Market
5,000 Compressed 26 KB 130
Periodical
MB/item
Plain text 2.5 KB 13 MB/item
Scanned TIFF 130 KB 20 MB/item
(600 dpi)
Newsletter 150
Compressed 26 KB 4 MB/item
Plain text 2.5 KB .4 MB/item

World

According to the 2000 Ulrich International Periodical Directory, there are 158,000 unique periodical
titles in the world. If one wished to include all serial publications, for example, yearbooks, annual
publications of all kinds, not just journals, one could cite the International Standard Serial Number
statistics: 617,801 for all serials around the world.

It is useful to differentiate between scholarly journals and mass market periodicals because of the
differences in number of pages per year. According to a recent study on Economic Cost Models of
Scientific Scholarly Journals, "A typical 1995 scientific scholarly journal has 8.3 issues... and 1,723
pages (or 208 pages per issue)." (Source: http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/icsu/kingppr.htm) A typical
mass-market periodical, (such as Time, Newsweek, or People) that is published weekly, will be
about 5,000 pages per year. (Source: Robert M. Hayes, "The Economics of Digital Libraries",
http://www.usp.br/sibi/economics.html). There are also newsletters, smaller than both the scholarly
journal and mass-market publications, at about 100 pages per year.

Using the ratios within the US periodical statistics as a reference point (see below), we can estimate
that about half of the world's periodical publications are mass - market magazines/tabloids,
one-fourth are scholarly journals, and one-fourth are newsletters.

United States

According to the 1999 US Statistical Abstract, there are 12,036 periodicals published in the United
States. Given the world total of 158,000, this seems low. Another estimate on United States
periodical production comes from the National Directory of Magazines: 20,613 titles as of August
2000 (this figure includes Canada).

The estimated number of scientific journals published in the United States increased 62 percent,
from 4,175 in 1975 to 6,771 in 1995 (Source: Designing Electronic Journals With 30 Years of
Lessons from Print, Tenopir and King, 1998 http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/04-02/king.html) Data
on periodicals in the field of modern languages and literature may serve as a rough index of the
trends in the general availability of scholarly journals outside the sciences. According to the MLA

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Directory of Periodicals, there are currently 3,700 periodicals in the areas of literature, language,
linguistics, and folklore covered regularly in the MLA International Bibliography. This means that
there are about 10,500 scholarly journals in the United States.

According to the Newsletter and Electronic Publisher's Association (NEPA), there is no way of really
knowing exactly how many newsletters exist, because they are not required to be registered
anywhere. There are two directories of newsletters: the Hudson Subscription Newsletter Directory
lists over 5,000 subscription newsletters while the Oxbridge Directory of Newsletters includes over
20,000 newsletter titles, of which they say 9,000 are subscription newsletters. NEPA's best guess is
that there are approximately 10,000 subscription newsletters in print today. (Source:
http://www.newsletters.org/faqs.htm)

Office Documents

Conversion Factors

Table 4: Office Documents Conversion Factors

Average # of Storage Format Average File Size Total
Document Annual
Pages per Year Production
Scanned TIFF (600 dpi) 130 KB 975
TB/year
7,500,000,000 Compressed 26 KB 195
TB/year
Plain text 2.5 KB 19 TB/year

Flow

United States

To estimate the amount of information generated by offices, one might begin by looking at the
statistics of the Federal Government, which is the single largest employer in the United States, with
1.8 million civilian workers as of 1998 and 1.2 million individuals in the armed services. The Federal
Government, in total, employs about 3% of the nation's workforce.

The National Archives in Washington D.C. retains 2% of what the government produces, across a
range of media. According to Archives representative Eric Chaskas, the Archives retains only what
is deemed to be of some permanent historical value. Document types include correspondence,
registers, reports, forms, treaties, case files, and log books. The perceived value determines how
long a record will be retained--some will be kept indefinitely, while others are retained for no more
than 6 months. An effort is made to prevent duplicating records but there is still some degree of
overlap. Although the NARA representative was unable to quantify how much new information is
accessioned each year, he did state that the current archival holdings, as of July 2000, include 4
billion pieces of paper, occupying a total of 21.5 million cubic feet. That is about 200 pieces of paper
per cubic foot.

If one divides 4 billion by the number of years the United States government has existed (224
years), one could obtain a rough number of pages collected per year by dividing 4 billion by 224 -
the result is about 18,000,000 pages per year.

The current accession rate, however, appears to be much higher. Each year, Federal agencies
submit about 4,000 items and about 75% of these (3,000) are processed for archival. Although the
Archives does not publish statistics on the average size of these items, it is known that NARA adds
a total of 500,000 cubic feet of mostly paper-based records each year. As previously noted, in

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archives, 1 cubic foot can hold 200 pieces of paper, so the total annual accession rate is therefore
about 100,000,000 pages per year.

If this represents 3% of the nation's workforce, then one could estimate that United States
companies produce a total of more than 3 billion archiveable pages each year, equivalent to 78
terabytes.

World

Using our rule of thumb that the US produces about 40% of the world's printed materials, we can
estimate that each year the world produces 7.5 billion archiveable pages, which would be
equivalent to 195 terabytes.

Stock

Again, consider the US National Archives with 4 billion pieces of paper. If this is 3% of the United
States total, then the total stock of paper held by US companies is somewhere on the order of 130
billion sheets of paper - about 3,380 terabytes.

Rate of Change

Despite the increasing use of computers for communication and storage, the production and
retention of paper office records is on the rise. The materials within the National Archives has
increased in volume by more than one-third, just in the past decade.

Visual Material (Maps, Posters, Prints and Drawings)

This is a difficult category to quantify because, unlike the book, newspaper, and periodical
industries, there is no central agency monitoring the production of originals or serving as a
repository for the items. The best method for approximating the production statistics is to consider
the holdings of the National Archives and the Library of Congress.

Conversion Factors

According to the Library of Congress, maps scanned in at 300 dpi tend to be large, approximately
100 to 300 MB. (Source: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/formats.html#V)

Flow

For photographs, see the Film Summary portion of this paper.

During 1998, the Library of Congress added 60,150 maps, 1,881 posters, and 4,723 prints and
drawings to its collections.

Stock

World

[???]

United States

The Library of Congress has 4,523,049 maps in its collections. 85,216 posters and 405,708 prints
and drawings. The National Archives has another 5 million maps and drawings, as well as 13 million
still photographs and 9 million aerial photographs.

Copies

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For the past 10 years, the US has produced about 30% of the world's paper and paperboard output
(US Industry & Trade Outlook 2000). Other major producers are Asia, Latin America, Canada, and
Europe. As of 1998, total global capacity was 333.6 million metric tons, with growth predicted so that
by 2001 the annual total is expected to be 348.1 metric tons. A recent article in the Economist
supports this forecast stating that, during the period 1993 - 1998, "the production of printing and
writing paper in North America has grown by over 13%. Worldwide it has doubled since 1982."

There are four different commodity segments in the paper/paperboard industry, only two of which
are relevant to this study: printing and writing paper and newsprint. In 1999, the US produced 23.8
million metric tons of printing and writing paper and 6.4 million metric tons of newsprint. The most
recent global production figures (available from UNESCO's Statistical Yearbook) are for 1997, at
which time the world was producing 90 million metric tons of printing and writing paper and 36
million metric tons of newspaper.

For the estimates of printing/writing paper, we used the midrange figure of 26 KB per 8 1/2 X 11
page. We estimated 500 sheets of standard grade 8 1/2 X 11 paper would weigh 5 pounds.
Therefore, each metric ton (2204 pounds) equals about 440 500-sheet-reams or 220,000 sheets.
Multiplying by 26 KB per page results in 6 GB per metric ton, for a total annual storage capacity of
142,800 possible terabytes (US) and 540,000 terabytes (world).

For newspapers, we estimate that storage requirements would be be about 2 times that for
writing/printing paper (12 GB per metric ton). Newspapers tend to contain more words and
graphics per page, requiring, on average 1 MB per page. Furthermore, newsprint is thinner and
lighter, so each metric ton contains more individual sheets. US newsprint production in 1997
equalled about 80,000 terabytes and international production was about 432,000 terabytes.

These figures provide an extreme upper bound on the total number of bytes required to digitally
store information currently produced in printed format each year.

Books

About 1.1 billion books were sold in the United States in 1999. (Source: Wall Street Journal, July
17, 2000, "A New Chapter: Independent Booksellers Hope to Find Strength in Numbers" by Scott
Eden.) This is an increase of more than 3% from 1998 when about 1,037,000 books were sold.
(Source: The 1999 Consumer Research Study on Book Purchasing, (Section II) Detailed Findings:
Consumer Adult Book Purchasing).

Newspapers

In the United States 55,979,332 daily newspapers and 59,894,381 Sunday newspapers circulate
each year. (Source: Newspaper Association of America.)

Periodicals

The total number of US magazines circulated annually exceeds 500 million. (Source: US Industry
and Trade Outlook 2000.)

Office Documents

Each year, almost 500 billion copies are produced on copiers in the US (13,000 TB); nearly 15
trillion copies are produced on copiers, printers, and multi - function machines. 15 trillion copies is
roughly equal to 390,000 TB. This accounts for the majority of the printing/writing paper used each
year. (Source: XeroxParc.) For specific information on fax printing, see the Telecommunications
Summary of this report.

A 1998 Coopers & Lybrand study showed that the average office makes 19 copies of each
document. The average office loses 1 out of 20 office documents. It then costs: $120 to search for
the document; $250 to recreate it, if lost (1 lost document = $370). (Source: NAGARA, Records
Management Technical Bulletin www.nagara.org/rmbulletins/bulletin_2.htm)

The Government Printing Office, which handles the printing needs of the entire Federal community,

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uses or sells more than 55 million pounds of paper each year. Approximately 10,000 titles are
available for sale to the public at any given time.

Fun Facts About Print Media

Paper Size Equivalencies

According to ArchiveBuilders.com: 1 pulp tree (loblolly pine) = 1/10th cord of wood = 10,000 pages
= 1 file cabinet = 4 boxes = 1/2 Gigabyte = 1 CD

Scope of the Library of Congress Collections

"LC21: A Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress," (a report from an advisory group at the
National Academy of Sciences about strategic directions for the applications of information
technology in the Library) reports the following statistics about the collections of the Library of
Congress:
● 26 million volumes (pages 2-3)

● 1 million serials (pages 2-3)

● 4.5 million maps (pages 2-5)

● 1,000,000 audio recordings (pages 2-6)

● 200,000 cans of film (pages 2-6)

● 13.5 million images (pages 2-7)

● 70,000 periodicals (pages 2-7)

● 1,400 newspapers (pages 2-7)

The Library receives some 22,000 items each working day and adds approximately 10,000 items to
the collections daily.

Paperless Society?

With the spread of the personal computer, many predicted the advent of the paperless office. So far,
this prediction has not come to pass. One one hand, according to BIFMA, a business and
institutional furniture manufacturer's association, as of Dec. 16, 1999, the percentage of file cabinets
in relation to other types of office furniture, like seating, desks, and tables, has steadily decreased,
from 16% in 1988 to 12.9% in 1998. This would lead one to believe that less paper is being
generated to require storage space. On the other hand, the installation of home computers and
expansion of home offices has led some analysts to predict that by 2003 the consumption of
standard office paper will double from the 1996 level (Source: 1999 U.S. Industry and Trade
Outlook, 10-3).

Growth of Online Periodicals

Of the more than 157,000 serial titles reported in the latest edition of the international periodicals
directory, 10,332 were available exclusively online or in addition to a paper counterpart (Source:
Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory, 1999, p. vii).

Bulk Mail

As of 1990, the United States Postal Service handled almost 90 billion pieces of first-class mail per
year and another 75 billion pieces of second- , third-, and fourth-class mail.

Americans receive almost 4 million tons of junk mail a year. About 44% of the junk mail is never
opened. Every person in the United States receives junk mail that represents the equivalent of one
and a half trees a year. (Source: The Consumer Research Institute's Stop Junk Mail Page)

For more information on flows of information through the mail, please see the Mail Summary of this
report.

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Print Media Bibliography

■ Bogart, Dave, ed. The Bowker Annual Library and Book Trade Almanac, 44th edition. New
Jersey: R.R. Bowker, 1999.
■ Cummings, Anthony M., Marcia L. Witte, William G. Bowen, and Laura O. Lazarus. University
Libraries and Scholarly Communication: A Study Prepared for the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation. The Association of Research Libraries, 1992
■ Hayes, Robert M., UCLA School of Information Science, "The Economics of Digital Libraries"
www.usp.br/sibi/economics.html
■ King, Donald W. and Carol Tenopir. "Economic Cost Models of Scientific Scholarly Journals,"
1998. www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/icsu/kingppr.htm
■ American Forest and Paper Association, 1999 Statistics for Paper, Paperboard and Wood
Pulp. Washington, DC, 1999. To order a copy, see www.afandpa.org/about/about.html or call
(800) 244-3090.
■ Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1999.
■ ArchiveBuilders.com White Paper, "Computer Storage Requirements for Various Digitized
Document Types"
■ Association of Research Libraries Statistics www.arl.org/stats/index.html
■ Books in Print, 1999-2000. New Jersey: R.R. Bowker, 1999.
■ International Standard Serial Number Register www.issn.org
■ International Standard Book Number Register www.isbn.org
■ JSTOR digital library. www.jstor.org/
■ Magazine Publishers of America, Information Center, (212) 872-3745.
www.magazine.org/resources/fact_sheets/ed1_8_99.html
■ National Directory of Magazines, www.mediafinder.com/mag_home.cfm
■ Newsletter and Electronic Publisher's Association (NEPA) www.newsletters.org/faqs.htm
■ Newspaper Association of America, Facts About Newspapers.
■ Newspaper Project, National Endowment for the Humanities,
www.neh.gov/preservation/usnp.html
■ Oxbridge Directory of Newsletters 1997. New York: Oxbridge Communications, Inc., 1997.
■ Ulrich's International Periodical Directory. New York: Bowker Publishing, 2000.
■ UNESCO Statistical Yearbook 1999. Paris, UNESCO, 1999.
■ U.S. Census Department, 1999 Statistical Abstract of the United States,
www.census.gov/prod/www/statistical-abstract-us.html
■ U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics
■ U.S. Government Printing Office, Prepared Statement before the Committee on Rules and
Administration, U.S. Senate on Public Access to Government Information in the 21st Century
July 1996.
■ U.S. Industry and Trade Outlook. Available in print from McGraw Hill/U.S Department of
Commerce Washington, D.C. or download from www.ntis.gov/products
■ Chaskas, Eric. US National Archives and Records Administration.
■ Walden's Paper Report. Twice-monthly newsletter, published by Walden-Mott Corporation,
Ramsey, NJ. Available by subscription only. See
www.walden-mott.com/PaperReport/PAP_RPT.HTM or call (201) 818-8630.

Charts

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© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Film Details

■ Impact of Digital Cameras on Rate of Growth of New Photographs

■ Conversion and Compression
● Photographs
● Motion Pictures
● X-Rays
■ Flow of New X-Rays
■ Medical Imaging
■ Other X-Ray Uses
■ Copies
■ Copies of Motion Pictures
■ Film Factoids
■ References and Sources

Impact of Digital Cameras On Rate of Growth of New Photographs

80 billion new photographs are taken around the world every year. Photography generally follows
the trends of the overall economy, for example, in the mid-1990's there was a slight slowdown in
photography concurrently with the economic recession experienced in many major world
economies, particularly those in Asia. However, it is expected that in the next five years there will be
continuing growth in the overall number of photographs as the enormous potential of China, India
and other developing regions is realized. At the present 25% of film sales occur outside of North
America, Western Europe and Japan. In June 2000 Kodak announced that China was its second
largest market after the United States. To give some perspective to the growth potential for
photography in China, film usage there is currently less than one roll per capita as opposed to 3.6
rolls per capita in the United States. Similarly, only 15% of Chinese households own cameras as
opposed to over 80 percent in the United States.

A countervailing trend to the growth of silver halide film based photography is the increasing
popularity of digital photography. Very rapid growth is predicted over the next five years for this
method of taking pictures. In 1999, in the United States almost 2 million digital cameras were sold,
double the number from the year before and representing about 12 percent of all cameras sold. In a
survey by NPD Intellect, more than 70% of consumers planning to buy a new camera say they will
choose a digital one. Kodak projects that digital photography will account for forty-five percent of its
revenue by 2005 from a current 17%.

Photofinishing News and Lyra Research predict that there will be an 80 percent growth in the
number of digital cameras worldwide by the year 2002. There were 8.3 million digital cameras in use
worldwide in 1999 according to this study. (compared to 200 million conventional film cameras in the
United States alone). Salomon Smith Barney predicts that the growth of photographic exposures
worldwide will grow from 71.4 billion in 1997 to 96.8 billion by 2002. At the same time, they expect
digital camera exposures to grow 1500 percent. Many of these photographers will use web photo
services. For example, Photo Works already hosts over 100 million images on its web site and there

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are many more companies competing in this same market. These companies indicate that at this
time 60 to 80 percent of the photographs on their web sites are scanned from silver halide film.

Kodak predicts that the growth trend will predominate until at least 2004, at which point traditional
film will gradually decline in use as the digital camera becomes ascendant.

The Internet may actually be increasing demand at the present for traditional photographs points out
Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. eBay has 4 million items for sale every day and the inventory turnover
averages about 7 days. About 80 percent of these items are accompanied by a photograph. About
one-half of one percent of current U.S. photographs are pictures of merchandise offered for sale on
eBay.

Table 1: Photographic Exposures (Billions)

Year: 1992 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2005

World 56 84.4 83.3 82 89

US 21 24.9 26.9 34.4 41.2

Source: 1992 statistics are from U.S. Industrial Outlook 1994; 1997 and 1998 U.S. Statistics are
from U.S. Industry and Trade Outlook 2000; 1997 and 1998 world statistics are from the Silver
Institute. The 1999 world figure is from Kodak's corporate web page. The 2000 U.S. figure is from
Kodak and printed in May 8, 2000 Wall Street Journal. The 2002 projection for the world is from the
Silver Institute. The 2005 projection is from the May 8, 2000 Wall Street Journal article and
attributed to Kodak.

Chart of the annual production of film used in conventional photography in the United States.

Conversion and Compression

Photographs

To assess the amount of data in terms of bits in a photograph, certain assumptions must be made
about the size of the film used and the technical way in which the photograph is digitized and stored.
Professional photographers generally use physically larger film formats with more chemical grains
on the film to store information than do amateur photographers. Conversion of these professional
photographs to a digital medium, therefore, generates a much bigger computer file. For example,
high quality professional photographs may require 40 megabytes or more of storage space.

In the early 1990's Kodak introduced the PhotoCD format for the storage of photographs on
compact disks. Since then, the format has been widely used by consumers, professional
photographers and archivists. Kodak estimates that most photographs can be converted to its
PhotoCD format with little to no loss of image data in 5 megabytes. Kodak's rule of thumb is that it
can place 100 photographs on one CD, which holds approximately 650 megabytes. For the sake of
carrying out our estimates of total photographic data, therefore, we use this same 5 megabyte
figure.

Of course, actual digital storage of photographs might consume far less space if any of the very
popular compression schemes are used. For example, the JPEG standard is commonly used to
reduce photographic file sizes to one-tenth of their original size. However, this is a "lossy"
compression, i.e., one where data is irrecoverably discarded in the compression.

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The 5 megabyte conversion factor used is also supported empirically by the extensive image
digitizing experience of the University of California, Berkeley Digital Library. The photographic
collection there is reported as containing 164,702 images which require 888 gigabytes of storage
space, or just over 5 megabytes per photograph.
(http://elib.cs.berkeley.edu/admin/rpts/TestSuite/00q2.html)

Motion Pictures

The conversion of motion pictures to digital media can result in very large file sizes. It is estimated
that each frame of film can be digitized in about 12 megabytes. However, to create the illusion of
seamless motion, 24 images are used per second of film. Thus, one second of film requires 288
megabytes of digital storage, one minute requires 17.28 gigabytes, and one hour requires 1
terabyte. At this rate a feature length film of 100 minutes would fill about 400 typical DVD's. Fox
Animation Studios, for example, reports that its animated feature "Anastasia" is 1.49 terabytes in
size. This particular film was digitally inked and painted and only then transferred to film for
theatrical distribution.

In cases where film will be distributed or stored on digital media such as DVD's some form of
compression must be used to make the file sizes tractable. The most common compression format
now used for motion pictures is MPEG-2. Using this format, a feature lenth film can be reduced to
several gigabytes in size and placed on a single DVD. This is a "lossy" compression format where
data that is present on the film is irrecoverably lost in the compression process.

X-Rays

The conversion of x-ray images to bits requires careful attention to the loss of information because
of the attendant risk of harm to patients. See, The Economist, "Why JPEG's Can Be Bad For Your
Health", June 2000, citing a study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology in
which researchers found that using JPEG with a compression ration of 16:1, the error rate was 30%
higher than for uncompressed images. In fact, in the United States conversion of x-rays to digital
format is regulated by the U.S. Government for the protection of the patients. FDA Regulation
510(k).

1 chest X-ray = 1 megabyte (14 x 17 inches), 150 dpi, 12 bits (compressed). 12 bits per pixel,
provides 4,096 shades of grey) (wavelet compression, lossless mode, has FDA 510(k) approval)
150 dpi, 12 bit images recommended by American College of Radiology for primary reads). (Source:
Steve Gilheany, Archive Builders )

A team of radiologists from the University of Florida estimated the size of a converted conventional
radiograph as 10 megabytes assuming a matrix size of 2048 x 2580 pixels with a 16-bit sample of
each pixel. This estimate assumes there will be no compression. Honeyman, Huda, Frost, Palmer &
Staab, "Picture Archiving and Communications System Bandwidth and Storage Requirements",
Journal of Digital Imaging, Vol. 9, no. 2, May 1996.

A slightly smaller estimate of the amount of storage required for a standard chest x-ray comes from
the University of Pittsburgh, Clinical Multimedia Lab, which estimates the size for a radiograph (2K *
2K * 16 bits) as approximately 8 megabytes (uncompressed). Clunie, David A., Lossless
Compression of Grayscale Medical Images - Effectiveness of Traditional and State of the Art
Approaches (Link to this paper (PDF))

This latter figure will be used because it does not assume compression and is generally consistent
with the assumptions made for converting traditional photographic film to digital format.
Furthermore, Dr. H.K. Huang, Radiologist at UC San Francisco, estimates that "a typical
examination generates betwen 10 and 20 MBytes." Huang, "Teleradiology Technologies and Some
Service Models" Computerized Medical Imaging and Graphics, Vol.20, No.2 (1996). Applying this
assumption of 8 mb per x-ray image results in a total amount of data stored on x-ray film of 16
petabytes.

Flow of New X-Rays

There are three common uses of x-ray film: medical imaging, dental imaging and non-destructive

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testing in manufacturing processes. The Silver Institute Reports that the medical uses of x-ray film
overwhelm the other categories, accounting for 92% of the world's overall x-ray film usage.

Medical Imaging

The administration of radiologic procedures in the United States and the developed world are fairly
well documented. The number of such procedures in the developing world, however, are harder to
come by. The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation found that no
data at all could be found for radiological procedures for half the world's population and that there is
only fragmentary data on examination rates for another quarter of the world's population.

Table 2: Medical X-Ray Procedures in United States

1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000

275 280 286 291 297 303 309 315 320

Source: Theta Reports

The UN Committee observed that the developed nations of the world use x-rays at a rate generally
consistent with that of the United States, i.e., approximately 1000 procedures (including dental uses)
for 1000 population. Therefore, on the assumption that the developed world's population is 1.2
billion, then a rate of x-ray procedures of slightly more than one per person per annum would yield
approximately 1.2 billion x-ray procedures per year in the developed world. The population of the
less developed world is 4.9 billion. If it is assumed that there are another 0.5 billion x-ray procedures
performed for this population, a rate one-tenth that of the developed world, then the world total of
annual medical and dental x-ray procedures is 1.7 billion.

According to Clinica Reports and Theta Reports, the world market for x-ray film is approximately
$3.5 billion per year with the United States market accounting for around $1.4 billion of that total
amount, a 40% share of the world market. If the dollar share of the market is reflective of the share
of procedures performed than there are about 750 million x-ray procedures annually. On the other
hand, it is reasonable to assume that film is sold for less in dollar terms around the world than in the
United States. If it is assumed that the price of film in other markets is 50% of that in the United
States, then this would work out to about 913 million x-ray procedures outside of the U.S., and
around 1.2 billion for the entire world.

Another approach to verifying these estimates is to take into account the use of silver for the
production of x-ray film as estimated by the Silver Institute. In 1998, 71.5 million troy ounces of silver
were used for medical x-ray film and that was sufficient to produce 387 million square meters, or 4.2
billion square feet, of x-ray film. This implies that one ounce of silver is enough to produce 5.4
square meters, or 58 square feet, of medical x-ray film. Theta Consulting estimated U.S.
consumption of 1.7 billion square feet of medical x-ray film to perform 309 million procedures in
1998, indicating usage of an average of 5.5 square feet of film per procedure. If the same amount of
film were used per procedure in the rest of the world, 450 million medical x-ray procedures were
performed there. This is consistent with a world wide x-ray procedure total of 750 million.

We have chosen to estimate the total number of world medical x-ray procedures at 1 billion annually
as a reasonable balance of the available statistics and assumptions discussed.

In order to determine the actual number of x-ray images taken some calculation must be made
based upon the average number of films taken per procedure (more than one image may be
captured on one film). In fact, the number of films used per procedure varies considerably. If 2 films
are shot for each x-ray procedure, there are approximately 2 billion x-ray medical images taken
worldwide every year.

Other X-Ray Uses

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The other major uses for x-ray film are dental imaging and the non-destructive testing of materials in
manufacturing and fabrication processes. These uses are approximately 8 percent of overall x-ray
film usage in developed nations according to the Silver Institute. Accordingly, based upon the
finding of 2 billion x-rays for medical purposes, then industrial and dental uses would amount to 160
million x-rays in the developed world for all purposes. The total world use of x-ray film is therefore
approximately 2.16 billion images annually.

Copies

As more photographs are digitized through inexpensive home scanners or are taken on digital
cameras in the first place, it is not yet clear how often paper copies will be made. Furthermore, it is
still unknown whether output from digital storage will typically be on photographic paper, or by
means of ink jet or thermal printers. Current indications are that ink jet printing will be the most
common process. In the year 2000, it is estimated that United States consumers will print out 5.4
billion photographic pictures, mostly at home. By the year 2005, this will quadruple to 26 billion. At
the same time, traditional photoprocessing is expected to grow only 20 percent to 41.2 billion prints.
(Source May 8, 2000 Wall Street Journal.)

The most common use made by consumers of digital images so far has been sharing them through
e-mail. Similarly many new businesses are counting on the consumer's desire to share digital
photos by hosting them on web sites. In December 1999 there were over 25 million unique home
visitors and 12 million work visitors to the web sites of over one hundred companies providing
photographic hosting services.

It is anticipated that the growing number of digital images owned by consumers will have a dramatic
impact on their need to consider making backup copies of their personal disk drives. Traditionally,
only a small percentage of home computer data is original data that requires backup at all. This
need will grow dramatically if many photographs are stored digitally. The web hosting companies
are counting on consumers storing the data on their sites and ordering prints from time to time.
Currently, consumers are able to get free photo developing and unlimited disk space from these
companies.

Copies of Motion Pictures

The Wolfman Report on the Photographic & Imaging Industry in the United States states that the
average number of prints per original motion picture is 700. The Silver Institute, however, reports
that 6,000 release prints are made for each feature movie. Interestingly, however, these copies are
short-lived. 98 percent of all films for theatrical distribution made in the United States are destroyed
by FPC, Inc.of Mountain City, Tennessee. After the films are no longer being shown in movie
theaters, they are sent to FPC, which destroys10 million pounds of film every year. The film is
shredded and sent to FPC's parent company, Kodak, where it is recycled and made into new film or
fuel used in power plants. (Source: Associated Press)

Film Factoids
■ Kodak describes the photography market as follows: 82 billion pictures processed a year
throughout the world with 750 million rolls of film processed annually in the United States and
2.9 billion rolls consumed worldwide. Kodak also estimates that of the photographs that are
processed approximately 2 percent are later reprinted or reused in some way.

SOURCE: http://kodak.com/US/en/corp/georgeFisher/shihPres.shtml, Presentation to

Imaging Technology Analysts Group on February 24, 1999. by Willie Shih, President, Digital
and Applied Imaging, and Vice President, Eastman Kodak Company.

More than 82% of U.S. households have cameras and use them to take over 17 billion
pictures annually. It is estimated that there are over 150 billion photographs stored in those
households. "Instant Images" Fortune, Winter 1997 (Technology Buyer's Guide Supplement)
184-187. This article cites these figures as according to the Photo Marketing Association.

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According to Kodak, China has become its second largest market. The per-capita film
consumption in China averages one roll a year, as compared with 3.6 rolls in America. Only
15 percent of Chinese own cameras. (XINHUA ECONOMIC NEWS SERVICE, 6/13/00).

■ The United States Library of Congress reports that it holds 12 million photographs in its
collection.

■ Number of UK Feature Films Produced Annually (1912-1998)

■ The Department of Commerce cites the journal Medical Imaging for the statistic that "U.S.
health care systems spend up to $7 billion a year on film alone." U.S. Industry and Trade
Outlook 2000, 44-18. Unfortunately for the film manufacturers, this probably overstates the
amount of sales by a wide margin. Theta Reports puts the sales of x-ray film at $1.4 billion in
1996 and expects it to reach $1.5 billion by 2000.

■ American women undergo approximately 30 million mammograms annually. Medical Industry

Today, December 20, 1999.

■ Approximately 150 million chest x-rays are done in the United States each year.(Source:
University of Pittsburgh, Clinical Multimedia Lab).

■ The Silver Institute reports that 92 million ounces of silver was used in 1999 for radiography
throughout the world. This association also reports that dental and commercial uses of x-ray
film traditionally account for about 8% of the total radiography market.

■ In 1996 it was estimated that the average institutional radiology department would generate
approximately 15.7 gigabytes of data per day and 3.5 terabytes per year. Honeyman, Huda,
Frost, Palmer & Staab, "Picture Archiving and Communications System Bandwidth and
Storage Requirements," Journal of Digital Imaging, Vol. 9, no. 2, May 1996.

■ Production of x-ray film is essentially controlled by three companies: Kodak, Sterling

Diagnostic Imaging/Agfa and Fuji Medical Systems. The U.S. market for x-ray film is about $1
billion annually. Modern HealthCare January 18, 1999.

■ "More than 32.5 million mammograms and 4.5 million cardiac catheterization procedures are
performed each year in the U.S., and X-rays account for 70 percent of all medical imaging
procedures." PR Newswire, Feb. 29, 2000, " New GE Digital Imaging Technology"

■ Kodak sells about $800 million year in x-ray film. Associated Press, Nov. 26, 1999. This also
seems to suggest that the statistic cited above is incorrect as to the overall U.S. x-ray film
market.

■ "The reduction in the number of competitors is clearly seen in the medical X-ray film market.
In 1995, there were five global players: Du Pont, 3M, Kodak, Fuji and Agfa, sharing
approximately 90% of the world market. In 1996, Du Pont sold its X-ray film business to
Sterling, which subsequently announced the resale of the business to Agfa in January 1999.
The imaging division of 3M was spun off into a new company, Imation, in 1996, and this was
subsequently purchased by Kodak in August 1998 for US$520 million. There are now only
three major players in the global market: Kodak, Agfa and Fuji, assuming that the
Agfa/Sterling deal is approved by the US FTC and the European Commission. This obviously
leads to dominant companies with market shares in excess of 40% in some major markets.
Further consolidation of these groups, however, would almost certainly run into legal
difficulties." Medical Device Technology (May 1999), Vol 10, no. 4

■ "Greater volumes of products and hence bargaining power are being concentrated into the
hands of a declining number of purchasers. The greater volume and value involved with each
negotiation mean that the market-share impact of either winning or losing a contract will

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increase. This can lead to a decline in prices, as witnessed following the merger of Columbia
and HCA, which was widely considered to have started the rapid decline of film prices in the
US market between 1996 and 1998. Prices fell by more than 20%, wiping approximately
US$150 million per annum off the value of the US X-ray film market." Id.

Film References and Sources

■ Photo Marketing International: http://www.pmai.org/

■ Photo Marketing Magazine: http://www.photomarketing.com/
■ Berkeley Digital Library Sunsite: Digitizing Imaging and Text:
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Imaging/

Reference Books

■ The Photography Encyclopedia (call number TR9.M39 1999)

■ Journal of Electronic Imaging (TK8315.J68)
■ NAICS 512110 Motion Picture and video production
■ SIC Code 7812 Motion picture and video production
■ The Film Encyclopedia
■ Guinness Book of Movie Facts and Feats
■ International Film Guide
■ Screen International
■ Screen Finance
■ Screen Digest
■ The Motion Picture Guide Annual 1999
■ The International Film Index, 1895-1990, edited by Alan Goble published by Bowker-Saur
(London: 1990).
■ The Silver Institute
■ Theta Reports, X-Ray Film Markets, Report No. 671, January 1997
■ University of Pittsburgh Clinical MultiMedia Lab
■ United States Government, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Center for Devices and
Radiological Health
■ United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, Reports to the
General Assembly, (New York 1993, 1994).

© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Optical Details

■ Originals
● Conversion Factors
● Flow
❍ World
❍ United States
● Stock
■ Copies
● Flow
❍ World
❍ United States
● Rate of Change
■ Bibliography
■ Charts

Originals

Conversion Factors

In its most common format, a compact disc (CD) holds about 650 MB.

A digital video disc or digital versatile disc (DVD) holds about 4.38 GB per disk - about 20 times
more data than a compact disc (CD). The DVD specifications describe four disk configurations:
single-sided (SS) vs. double-sided (DS) and single-layered (SL) vs. double-layered (DL) disks. Total
storage capacities for DVDs range from 1.36 GB to 15.90 GB as seen in the following chart,
reproduced from JimTaylor's DVD Demystified, an authoritative set of answers to Frequently Asked
Questions about DVD:

Table 1: DVD Storage Capacities

Format Capacity
DVD-5 (12 cm, SS/SL) 4.38 GB of data, over 2 hours of video
DVD-9 (SS/DL) 7.95 GB, about 4 hours
DVD-10 (12 cm, DS/SL) 8.75 GB, about 4.5 hours
DVD-14 (12 cm, DS/ML) 12.33 GB, about 6.5 hours
DVD-18 (12 cm, DS/DL) 15.90 GB, over 8 hours
DVD-1 (8cm, SS/SL) 1.36 GB, about .5 hour
DVD-2 (8cm, SS/DL) 2.48 GB, about 1.3 hours

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DVD-3 (8cm, DS/SL) 2.72 GB, about 1.4 hours

DVD-4 (8cm, DS/DL) 4.95 GB, about 2.5 hours
DVD-R 1.0 (12 cm, SS/SL) 3.68 GB
DVD-R 2.0 (12 cm, SS/SL) 4.38 GB, 8.75 GB for rare DS discs
DVD-RW 2.0 (12 cm, SS/SL) 4.38 GB, 8.75 GB for rare DS discs
DVD-RAM 1.0 (12 cm, SS/SL) 2.40 GB
DVD-RAM 1.0 (12 cm, DS/SL) 4.80 GB
DVD-RAM 2.0 (12 cm, SS/SL) 4.38 GB
DVD-RAM 2.0 (12 cm, DS/SL) 8.75 GB
DVD-RAM 2.0 (8 cm, DS/SL) 1.36 GB
CD-ROM (12 cm, SS/SL) 0.635 GB
CD-ROM (8 cm, SS/SL) 0.18 GB

Flow

World

It is a fairly simple matter to obtain information about the world music market value and units
shipped; organizations such as the Recording Industry Association of America and the International
Federation of the Phonographic Industry report these statistics each year. More difficult to obtain are
international statistics on the number of unique titles released each year. To obtain this figure, we
used statistics regarding the US market share and US record releases (see below) to estimate the
total releases worldwide. The United States holds a 37% share of the world music market and
releases about 33,100 items per year. Therefore, the world produces about 90,000 originals per
year, equivalent to 58 TB (uncompressed).

United States The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) reports annual figures for new
releases and album re-releases. The 1998 releases are equivalent to about 21 TB of data.

Table 2: Audio Releases

1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998
18,400 20,300 36,600 30,200 30,200 33,700 33,100
Source: http://www.riaa.com/MD-US-6.cfm

Stock

The All Music Guide (www.allmusic.com), a comprehensive entertainment database for music,
videos, DVDs and video games, provides statistics on the number of CD-audio originals in the
world. The AMG database is licensed by major music sites such as CDNow, ArtistDirect and
Tunes.com. AMG's listings indicate a total of 523,363 albums (445,735 popular music and 77,628
classical music albums). Each CD can hold 650 MB, so the total AMG catalog would equal roughly
340 TB.

According to the 1999 edition of CD-ROM's in Print, there are about 16,200 unique CD-ROM titles.
This figure includes business applications (such as word processing and spreadsheet packages),
games, reference tools, and instructional programs.

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Copies

Flow

World

Replication

Replication statistics include discs for retail as well as discs used for promotions, training, and
rental. Some percentage of the replicated discs also turn out badly and are never used. These
figures give us an upper bound on the amount of information that could be stored on compact disc
each year.

In 1999, there were 4,654 million audio CDs and 3,591 million CD-ROMs replicated worldwide,
according to the International Recording Media Association (IRMA). In addition, 194 million
DVD-Video units, 12 million DVD-ROM units, and 2 million DVD-Audio units were replicated in
1999.

United States

Replication

For audio CDs, data CD-ROMs, DVD-ROM, and DVD-Audio disks, North America produced roughly
50% of all the disks replicated. In addition, North America replicated about 75% of the DVD videos.

Retail

During 1999, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, 938.9 million CDs were
shipped to retail by U.S. producers. The U.S. has a 37% share of the world's sales. The nine next
largest markets are Japan, which follows our lead with 16.7%, followed by the United Kingdom
(7.6%), Germany (7.4%), France (5.2%), Canada (2.3%), Brazil, Australia and Spain (1.7% each),
and Mexico (1.6%). From the US figures and market share, one can extrapolate that CD shipments
worldwide are about 2,537 million units. This is equivalent to 1.6 billion TB.

Rate of Change

According to the London-based International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the
global music market was worth US $38.5 billion in 1999 - up by 1% in constant dollar terms with
total unit sales of US$3.8 billion in 1999. Overall units remained level, with a continued growth of 3%
in the CD market offset by a 10% decline in cassette sales and an 11% decline in singles.

Bibliography

■ The All Music Guide, www.allmusic.com

■ The CD Information Center www.cd-info.com/CDIC/index.html
■ CD-ROM Finder: The World of CD-ROM Products for Information Seekers. Medford, NJ:
Learned Information, 1993
■ CD-ROMs in Print, 13th Edition: An International Guide to CD-ROM, CD-I, 3DO, MMCD,
CD32, Multimedia, Laserdisc, and Electronic Products. New York: The Gale Group, 1999.
■ DVD Entertainment Group www.dvdinformation.com
■ DVD Insider www.dvdinsider.com
■ Taylor, Jim. DVD FAQ www.dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html
■ DVD Channel News www.dvdchannelnews.com
■ International Federation of the Phonographic Industry www.ifpi.org

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■ International Recording Media Association, Statistics page
www.recordingmedia.org/statistics/statistics_idx2.html
■ Medialine www.medialinenews.com
■ Optical Storage Technology Association www.osta.org/
■ SUN CD-ROM FAQ saturn.tlug.org/suncdfaq/
Charts

© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Magnetic Details

■ Magnetic Storage Media

● Hard Disk Drives
● Floppy Disks
● Removable Magnetic Disk Drives
● Magnetic Tape
■ Digital Data Creation
■ Analog Storage Tape
■ Conversion Issues
■ References and Resources

Magnetic Storage Media

The first magnetic storage mechanism was the Telegraphone invented in 1898 by Danish scientist
Valdemar Poulsen.

The digital revolution has so far been magnetic. The vast majority of the world's data is now created,
transported and stored in electro-magnetic systems.

Hard Disk Drives (World)

No storage medium has ever had the explosive growth demonstrated by the hard disk.

Storage Capacity
Year Disks Sold (Thousands)
(PetaBytes)
1995 89,054 104.8
1996 105,686 183.9
1997 129,281 343.63
1998 143,649 724.36
1999 165,857 1394.60
2000 187,835 2553.7
2001 212,800 4641
2002 239,138 8119
2003 268,227 13027

Source: IDC (1999) "1999 Winchester Disk Drive Market Forecast and Review"

The incredible growth in hard disk shipments has been accompanied by a relentless decrease in the cost

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per gigabyte of storage capacity:

Year Cost per GB GB's PER $200

1988 $11,540 0.02
1989 9,300 0.02
1990 6,860 0.03
1991 5,230 0.04
1992 3,000 0.07
1993 1,460 0.14
1994 705 0.28
1995 330 0.61
1996 179 1.12
1997 94 2.13
1998 43 4.65
1999 23 8.70
2000 13 15.38
2001 6 33.33
2002 3 66.67

Source: Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2000

Details regarding hard disk shipments.

Rates of Growth

The projections for the growth over the next few years in hard disk sales are for units shipped to increase
at an annual rate of 15 to 20% but for the actual capacity shipped to grow much faster - 70 - 80%
annually.

According to Disk/Trend, 75% of the disk drives sold are for desktop computers, followed by 13% for
servers and 12% mobile drives for laptop computers. Therefore, although enterprise level disk storage
systems each may have huge capacity, the vast number of disks deployed to individual workstations
really accounts for the enormous scale of the world's current digital storage capability.

The lifespan of a hard disk is approximately 3 years. The storage capacity of the hard disks shipped in
1998, 1999 and 2000 is 4672 petabytes, or roughly 5 exabytes. In order to appreciate the scale of this
statistic, consider that Roy Williams of CalTech advises that 5 exabytes is equivalent to the number of
words ever spoken by all human beings.

The hard disk typically shipped with a desktop personal computer in 2000 holds 10 gigabytes.

Disk drives are expected to be deployed in applications other than personal computers, such as TV
set-top boxes. These increasingly popular devices allow users to store TV shows on disk rather than tape
and to stop and rewind during a broadcast while still recording. In all, by 2003 the IDEMA predicts that
8-10 percent of the disk drive market will be such devices.Similarly, starting in the year 2000 audio
jukeboxes and computer game consoles will also include hard disk drives. Already the higher resolutions
of digital cameras are creating such large file sizes that small hard disks will be incorporated into
cameras as well.

Floppy Disks (World)

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The number of floppy disk drives sold every year has remained relatively constant at around 100 million
units for the past several years. Little change is expected. (Source: Computer Tech Review, April 1,
1999). The number of floppy disks being sold is diminishing rapidly as their storage capacity is too small
to be useful in light of the much larger file sizes now common.

3.5" Disks Total Capacity 5.25" Disks

Year
(billions) (terabytes) (millions)
1996 1.823 2625 32
1997 1.179 1698 11.7

Source: International Recording Media Association

The Japanese Recording Media Industries Association, however, claim somewhat higher figures for
floppy disk production, although confirming that the trend is still dramatically downward. This
organization, for example, anticipated sales of 2.21 billion floppies in 1998. It would appear that an
estimate of 2 billion for 1998, 1.5 billion for 1999 and 1 billion for 2000 would be a reasonable
compromise around these figures. This would indicate that there would be a total stock of floppy disks of
4.5 billion, assuming 3 years production as stock.

One of the world's largest producers of 3.5 inch floppy disks is CMC Magnetics. They claim to have
produced over 700 million disks in 1998. They also are purported to produce 56% of the world's floppy
disks in 2000, implying a market of somewhere north of 1 billion disks.

Floppy disks are used primarily for backup and are little used now for original content creation.

Removable magnetic disk drives (World)

Removable drives are primarily used for backup, transfer of files, e.g,, desktop publishing files to service
bureaus, or video or image editing. The general trend for low-end disk (capacity of around 100 to 250
megabytes, e.g. Iomega Zip Drives) sales is upward with a strong possibility that, if manufacturer
incompatibility issues are ever resolved, this format could replace the 1.44 mb floppy. However, high
capacity removable drives, with capacity in the gigabyte or better range, are being replaced by recordable
CD's, which in turn may be replaced by recordable DVD's.

Year Low-End Disk Drives High-End Disk Drives

1996 3723 992
1997 7724 1334
1998 12035 1164
1999 17039 701
2000 21775 623
2001 26087 578
2002 30182 554
2003 34287 541

Source: IDC (1999), "1999 Optical/Removable Storage Market Forecast and Review"

The high capacity drives (Iomega Jaz) come with a free cartridge and it is assumed that an additional
three cartridges are sold with each drive. Source: San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 23, 1998 "Does Bad
News for Iomega Mean Horrible News for HMT?"

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The amount of original content created directly to this medium is, therefore, probably quite low.
Furthermore, the disks are regularly reused and not generally viewed as archival solutions.

Magnetic Tape

Tape was the primary storage medium for the first generation of electronic computers in the 1950's.
Reel-to-reel half-inch tape was used for data storage on mainframe computers from the earliest days of
computing into the 1970's. Since that time, numerous tape formats have been developed. The worldwide
installed base for tape drive units is 25.2 million.Michael Lesk estimated that in 1995, the magnetic tape
industry would ship 200 petabytes of blank tape. (Lesk, M., "Preserving Digital Objects: Recurrent Needs
and Challenges").

Current estimates are that approximately $1 billion of tape media will be sold every year. Source,
Infostore July 1, 1999 (Tape: The Media Is the Message).

Worldwide Tape Drive Shipments - 1996-2003 (in thousands)

1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003
DC2000 3231.5 2365 1695.3 1867.3 1814.8 1749.4 1711.0 1688.7
SLR 350.4 327.1 311.7 290.0 278.3 272.0 267.5 266.8
4 mm 1370.0 1607.5 1634.8 1689.4 1650.5 1592.8 1525.9 1426.7
8 mm 201.8 213.6 180.9 138.2 131.0 127.7 135.1 149.3
DLT 160.0 356.4 366.1 483.5 550.3 612.5 677.4 746.5
LTO Ultrium 0 0 0 0 28.5 59.5 112.0 192.1
0.5" Cartridge 45.2 46.2 46.6 46.5 45.4 44.1 42.6 40.9
Total: 5358.8 4915.7 4235.3 4514.9 4498.9 4458.0 4471.5 4511.0

In a filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission in July 1999, Storage Tek, a large
tape drive manufacturer, wrote that the cost of data storage on computer tape media was less than
$.005/megabyte ($5.00/gb). Therefore, if predictions are correct that approximately $1 billion of computer
tape media is sold every year, that implies worldwide annual tape storage capability of 200 petabytes.
There may be some incongruity in these figures because the $1 billion may reflect manufacturer revenue
for the product, rather than the retail cost of the product to end users, which would presumably be much
higher. In fact, the Department of Commerce figures for the mid-1990's showed factory revenue for
computer tape manufacturer's of around $600 to 700 million. Substantial amounts of tape media are
manufactured in other countries so it is likely that $1 billion is a producer revenue figure.

If it is assumed that the retail price of the tape media is twice that of the manufacturer's then $2 billion of
retail sales of tape would work out to around 400 petabytes of storage capacity. The markup at retail over
manufacturer's prices is likely limited due to competition and the common practice of users purchasing
bulk quantities of tape. Further, some moderation is due to the lower price of DAT format.

Low-End Formats

The Imation DC2000, or Travan, quarter-inch tape drive is a low-end product used primarily for the
backup of desktop PC's. Their general capacity is in the range of 500 megabytes to 4 gigabytes. In
August 2000, a Sony Travan Formatted MiniCartridge capable of holding 4 gb uncompressed was
advertised for sale on the Internet for $29.49 each. A comparable 4gb tape cartridge manufactured by
Maxell was available for $30.79.

Tandberg SLR (Scalar Linear Recording) is also a backup format for desktops and workstations and
typically store 350 megabytes to 4 gigabytes.

4 mm tape drives are the largest segment of the market and use digital audio tape (DAT) format. They
are commonly deployed as backups for PC servers. These drives generally provide backup in the range
of 5 to 40 gigabytes (uncompressed). This format has an installed base of 7.6 million users.

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Magnetic Details

Mid-Level Formats

8 mm tape drives provide storage in the 14 to 50 gigabyte range. Vendors include Exabyte (Mammoth),
Sony (AIT), IBM (Magstar 3570).

DLT: (Digital Linear Tape) produced by Quantum Corporation. mid-range computer backup with 15 to 40
gigabytes of native capacity. There are more than 1.4 million DL Tape drives deployed and there have
been approximately 40 million tape cartridges in this format sold. Quantum estimates that by the end of
2000, there will be 1.9 million DLT drives shipped to customers.

LTO Ultrium. A new format from consortium of IBM, Seagate and Hewlett Packard. The specification for
the Ultrium format is for 100 gigabytes of native storage.

Enterprise Level Formats

1/2-inch cartridge: The dominant format in the mainframe, enterprise level storage market.

Automated tape libraries - which provide completely automated hands-off storage management, including
random tape access, sophisticated robotics, unattended backup, and reduced labor costs - are expected
to grow from less than 18,000 units shipped in 1996 to close to 120,000 units by 2002. (Source: Freeman
Reports)

There is an industry rule of thumb that suggests a three-to-one ratio of disk capacity over tape be
maintained.

Format 3490E 3480 Reel-to-Reel

1996 9.3 million 11.7 million 2.1 million
1997 10.7 million 9.5 million 1.9 million

Source: International Recording Media Association

The retail price in August 2000 of 3590 tape cartridges with 10 gb native capacity was $53.21. Fuji Film
DLT Tape cartridges were also available at retail for $51.10 for 10 gb native capacity. Sony DLT tapes
were being sold for $49.72 for 10 gb. uncompressed.
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From low-end formats such as Travan, through most popular format DLT, to high-end 3590 format, retail
price of roughly $5.00 per gigabyte of native storage capacity on tape seems reasonable estimate. (DAT
tapes are the only exception and are a lot cheaper.) Of course, if larger purchases result in substantial
discounts, then the revenue assumptions would commensurately be pushed more toward the $1 billion
wholesale estimate; therefore, not really affecting the calculation of the price per gigabyte of storage
capacity.

According to Computer Technology Review (March 1998) the total storage at a typical Fortune 1000 site
is projected to escalate from 10 TB in 1997 to 1 PB by the year 2000. In the next five years, a typical
large database system for US Government agencies is expected to accept 5TB per day and archive from
15 to 100 PB.

In 1995 Freeman Associates predicted that the total number of tape libraries would increase from 6,454
in 1994 to about 90,000 by the year 2000.

The estimate of the amount of original data stored on tape will, therefore, focus only on mass storage
applications from large-scale scientific applications to heavily transaction oriented business applications.
The installed base of IBM mainframe OS390 class computers is estimated by IDC to be around 16,500 in
2000.

The number of tape cartridges required to backup small sized computer disks is relatively few and will
never substantially exceed the capacity necessary to backup the entire hard disk or disk array. Typical

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backup storage strategy is to store the entire file system once and then do incremental updates of any
changes made, reducing the amount of storage necessary to keep a current copy of the entire file system
at hand.

In large scale tape libraries, there may be thousands or even tens of thousands of magnetic tapes
providing primary storage of the application data. The scale of storage requirements is growing rapidly as
new facilities, such as the Large Scale Hadron Collider, are built and start performing experiments. Large
scale databases are also becoming more common as corporations make increasing efforts to
comprehensively track consumer transactions.

The number of households conducting banking transactions may reach 32 million by 2003. The cost of an
Internet banking transaction is an estimated 1 cent, compared with $1.14 per transaction by teller, 55
cents by phone, 29 cents by ATM and 2 cents by proprietary computer system. (Source: "Banking on the
Internet")

The importance of massive scale databases in general commercial arenas is exemplified by the
experience of Wal-Mart, a leader in so-called "data mining" technology and the owner of one of the
largest privately held data sets. The U.S. Department of Commerce in its July 2000 report "Digital
Economy 2000" points out that "over a three-year period, Wal-Mart achieved a 47 percent increase in
sales on only a 7 percent increase in inventories by using a relational database system running on
massively parallel computers. The system allows vendors to access almost realtime information on sales
and customer transactions and handles 120,000 queries each week from 7,000 suppliers."

Digital Data Creation

Computers for the most part may not greatly contribute to the production of new and original data, but the
great exception is in scientific explorations where huge data sets are commonplace and where new
discoveries rely on computing and storage.

High Energy Physics

The Large Hadron Collider is being built at CERN in Switzerland, it is expected to be conducting
production experiments in around 2005. It is expected to generate approximately 20 petabytes of data
per experiment at rates of 100-1500 megabytes per second. Currently experiments in high energy
physics generate data at the rate of 35 megabytes per second and many hundred terabytes per
experiment. Obviously, this is all original data.

Source: Shiers, Jamie, "Massive-Scale Data Management using Standards-Based Solutions" IEEE 16th
Symposium on Mass Storage Systems.

The BaBar experiment at SLAC will generate approximately 200TB/year of data at a rate of 10MB/sec for
10 years.

Los Alamos National Laboratory estimated total storage capacity in its open storage system at 243
terabytes and in its secure system at 2.31 petabytes as of 1998. It is also anticipated that storage
capacity will grow to 5 petabytes in 2001.

GeoScience

The majority of data held and administered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are
held at three national data centers: the National Climatic Data Center at Asheville, NC; the National
Oceanographic Data Center at Silver Spring, MD; and the National Geophysical Data Center at Boulder,
CO. The climatic data is by far the largest of the three collections, holding approximately 640 terabytes on
350,000 magnetic tapes. The geophysical and oceanographic data total a combined 12 terabytes on
14,500 tapes.

The NASA Center for Computational Sciences in Greenbelt MD has 27,692 tapes holding data as of
August 2000. This Center is using 3590 and 9840 tapes which hold 20 gb per tape uncompressed. This
Center also automatically makes duplicate tapes for all new data generated. As of August 2000, this
storage facility holds 92.5 terabytes of unique data and over 162 terabytes counting the duplicate data.
New data is received at the rate of approximately 200-300 gigabytes per month.

The University of Tokyo stores satellite images in an environmental digital library of approximately 6

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terabytes, approximately 60,000 images that average 100 megabytes in size.

The San Diego SuperComputer Center stored as of August, 1998 approximately 65 terabytes. The SDSC
as of that time held the data on approximately 11,000 tapes. As of mid-2000, the SDSC is storing
1.5e+15 bytes.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in 1996 had about 68 TB and was growing at the
rate of 1.5 TB per month.

Analog Storage Tape

The first uses of magnetic media for data storage occurred about fifty years ago with the development of
magnetic tape. A number of formats have evolved over the decades but today by far the most prevalent
are the cassette tape used for the mass market distribution of prerecorded music. The other important
use of magnetic tape for the storage of analog signals is videotape recordings.

Analog Audio Tape

The distribtution of prerecorded music is one of the most common uses of magnetic tape. The sales of
music in this format, however, are now much smaller than they have been historically and are generally
expected to continue to decline as digital media become more prevalent and convenient.

United States
U.S. Sales 1982 1985 1990 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999
Cassettes(mil.) 182.3 339.1 442.2 339.5 345.4 272.6 225.3 172.6 158.5 123.6
Cassette
x x 9.2 11 11.2 12.6 16.9 18.6 27.2 14.2
Singles

Source: Recording Industry Association of America

Although there has been a dramatic decline in the overall sales of cassette tapes due to the availability of
music on alternative formats, there has been a booming market for books-on-tape. According to the
Audio Publishers Association, this market is estimated to have grown 100% since 1990. The reasons for
this are that cassettes can run 40 minutes longer than CDs, they have a built-in "bookmark", and they are
frequently listened to in the car, and 75% of cars are manufactured with only an AM/FM cassette radio.

The IFPI reports that for the entire world prerecorded music sales on cassette tape were down by 11% in
1998 to 1.2 billion due to depressed sales in Asia.

Blank Audio Tape

The U.S. shipments of blank audio tape dropped dramatically during the 1990's.

Manufacturers' U.S. Shipments of Blank Audio Cassettes

Year Dollars (000s Omitted) Unit (000s Omitted )

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1984 $268,287 243,061

1985 $286,865 295,313
1986 $336,179 368,488
1987 $363,336 387,518
1988 $369,550 396,587
1989 $397,734 429,963
1990 $387,895 437,840
1991 $367,716 436,659
1992 $369,769 436,739
1993 $353,022 437,783
1994 $338,428 438,949
1995 $301,316 415,028
1996 $247,442 330,353
1997 $215,576 296,151

Source: International Recording Media Association

Worldwide shipments of blank audio tape are expected to decline in 2000 to 921 million units from 971
million in 1999, with an anticipated market for 771 million cassette tapes by 2003. Source: Consumer
MultiMedia Report, Dec. 27, 1999.

Analog Video Tape

Prerecorded VideoTapes (VHS Format) (World)

1997 - 1.666 billion

1998 - 1.719 billion
1999 - 1.748 billion
2000 - 1.664 billion
2001 - 1,561 billion

Source: International Recording Media Association

The main use of the blank video tape is the consumer's use to record televison programs. It is anticipated
that there would be a large drop in the sales of this tape if pay-per-view television shows carried copy
protection. It is estimated that a very large share of the users of video cassette recorders do so for time
shifting of viewing programs.

Blank VideoTapes (VHS Format T-120 equivalent units) (World)

1997 - 1,485 million

1998 - 1,446 million
1999 - 1,463 million
2000 - 1400 million
2001 - 1,275 million

Source: International Recording Media Association

Another view of the blank video market came from British research firm Understanding & Solutions. Their
prediction was for 1.147 billion blank videocassettes in 1999 compared to 1.146 in 1998.

The stock of videotape in 1997 was estimated at about 4.6 billion by Richard Kelly, Cambridge
Associates.It is not clear whether this is referring to all videos, including those sold blank, or just
prerecorded. Further, it is not specified whether this estimate is solely for the United States or includes
the whole world. (Feb. 1997 Newsletter, IRMA) We have taken this estimate into account but not used it
directly because it seems that the flow of new videotapes worldwide each year would yield a considerably
higher figure, even assuming a lot of videotapes may be viewed as disposable after a few years. We
have instead estimated a world stock of videotape of all format at around 10 billion.

Conversion

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Audio Conversion Issues

In translating the vast quantity of audio information available on cassette tape into its digital equivalent,
we have chosen to use the CD format, linear PCM audio at a 16-bit word length and 44.1kHz sample
rate. Although, professional recording studios use a sampling rate of 96kHz, the vast majority of tape
recorded audio material is music for consumer use and the CD format is the digital format of choice for
this application. The amount of data generated by this format is easily calculated. There are 44,100 16-bit
samples taken each second for two tracks. Thus,1.4 million bits per second and 5.08 gigabits per hour
are generated. The conversion to bytes yields 605 mBs per hour. (1 mByte = 1,048,576 bytes). This data
is not compressed and yields a reasonable representation of music for most people.

Video Conversion Issues

In making assumptions about the size of analog videotape stores we have chosen to make conversions
assuming the use of MPEG-2 video compression standard. In the case of videotape, the use of this
conversion factor is seen as appropriate because it was designed as a generic format for digital
multimedia and includes coding schema for both video and audio.

In the case of video, the massive amount of data generated requires that for any practical purpose some
compression scheme must be used. MPEG-2 is now the international standard for video storage.
Compression is achieved in two ways: spatial compression and temporal compression. The spatial
compression is achieved by reducing the number of bits used to represent a single frame. Temporal
compression, where the bulk of the savings come, attempts to encode only the bits that represent the
portions of a frame that have changed from the previous frame.

The actual amount of compression that can be achieved with MPEG-2 varies quite a bit, we have
assumed that 2 gigabytes is adequate to represent 1 hour of high-fidelity audio and high-definition video
data.

References and Resources

Gibson, G.D. (1994): Audio, Film and Video Survey. A report on an international survey of 500 audio,
motion picture film and video archives. Library of Congress, Washington DC.

Moving Pictures Expert Group

© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Web Details

■ "A Cyveillance Study: Sizing the Internet" Summarized

■ "The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value" Summarized
■ Excel Spreadsheet with further information.

"Sizing the Internet: A Cyveillance Study"

Source: Cyveillance, 10-July-2000
■ 2.1 billion unique, publicly accessible web pages, and about 4 billion by early 2001 if the
current rate of growth continues;
■ 7.3 million uniques ages added per day;
■ Average page size: 10,060 bytes;
■ Average number of images on page: 14.38 (median);
■ Percentage of US vs. international pages: 84.7%/15.37%
■ Internet still continues to grow at accelerating rate;

"The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value"

Source: BrightPlanet LLC, July 2000
■ The deep Web contains 7,500 tarabytes of information, compared to 19 terabytes of
information in the surface Web;
■ The deep Web contains nearly 550 billion individual documents compared to the 1 billion of
the surface Web;
■ 60 of the largest web sites contain about 750 terabytes of information;
■ More than half of the deep Web content resides in topic specific databases;
■ Average page size on the surface Web is 18.7 kbytes, while on the deep Web - 13.7 kbytes,
and median for the deep Web is 19.7 kbytes;
■ Average deep Web site has a Web-expressed (HTML included basis) database size of 74.4
megabytes, and a median of 169 kbytes;

More Information

Excel Spreadsheet: rawdata.xls

HTML Created from Excel Spreadsheet: click here. [202K]

© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Email Details

■ "Email Growth Hogs Enterprise Resources" Summarized

■ "AOL Per-User Email Figures Climb 60 Percent in 1999" Summarized
■ "Messaging Today: Worldwide Trends" Summarized
■ 24/7 Media: Email Facts
■ Nov. 92 - Nov. 94 Messaging Statistics
■ Junk Email Statistics
■ Other Information
■ Final Thoughts

"E-Mail Growth Hogs Enterprise Resources"

Source: Network World Magazine, 31-Jan-2000
■ Study of corporate email usage, citing David Ferris, president of Ferris Research;
■ Average number of messages received by end users is expected to jump 81% to 34 per day
by the beginning of 2001;
■ Average size of a message is expected to increase 192% to 286 kbytes by the beginning of
2001 [with growth attributable to attachments];
■ There are nearly 170 million corporate email boxes worldwide, more than three times the
number of boxes five years ago, according to Eric Arnum, editor of "Messaging Online";
■ There are approximately 440 million corporate and personal mailboxes worldwide

"AOL Per-User Email Figures Climb 60 Percent in 1999"

Source: "Messaging Online," 4-Feb-2000
■ 3.5 messages per AOL user per day in 1998, and 5.6 in 1999;
■ 110 messages sent in 1999, up from 50 million in 1998;
■ 20.5 million users at the end of 1999
■ Email usage per person increased 60 percent in 1999;
■ "If you believe every person in the U.S. has an email account (and it's beginnign to seem that
way), then you are talking 1.54 billion messages per day, or 560 billion messages per year. If
you believe half the population has email, then your numbers are 770 million messages per
day or 280 billion messages per year. Adjust those numbers to reflect heavier usage by the
workforce email users and lighter usage by Webmail and ISP users, and you possibly could
come up with a trillion messages per year."
■ In 1999, the U.S. Postal Service delivered over 200 billion pieces of mail, so email volume
now outpaces postal mail volumes;

"Messaging Today: Worldwide Trends"

Source: "Messaging Online," 14-Mar-2000

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Email Details
■ The total number of electronic mailboxes in the world has soared 83.5 percent in the past
year to 569,171,660 mailboxes;
■ In the U.S., the number of mailboxes has jumped 73 percent to 333.5 million mailboxes since
the end of 1998. In the rest of the world, the total number of mailboxes has grown 101
percent to 235.6 million mailboxes in the past year;
■ In the U.S., the average corporate email user has around 1.5 mailboxes, and the average
household using email has about 4 mailboxes.
■ There are about 89 million Americans using email at work and roughly 50 million households
using email
■ There are probably 110 million Americans using email at home or at work, 40 percent of the
population.
■ There are fewer than one billion televisions in the world, fewer than 800 million phone lines,
and 569.2 million mailboxes;
■ This paper contains other interesting information and graphs. Here are two samples::

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Email Details

24/7 Media: Email Facts

Source: 24/7 Media
■ Opt-in email volume will jump 52.3% to 61.1 billion by year-end 2000, and reach 240 billion
messages by 2003.
■ There were 78 million active e-mail users, aged 13 and older, in the U.S. at year-end 1999,
accounting for 35% of the total U.S. population of adults and teens (13+)
■ By year-end 2002, there will be 135 million e-mail users, representing 59% of the overall U.S.
population of adults and teens. (Source: Emarketer)
■ There were 409 million e-mail boxes worldwide in 1999, up from 234 million a year earlier. In
1999, an estimated 20% of all e-mail received in the U.S. was commercial, split almost
evenly between spam and permission e-mail (Source: Emarketer)

Nov. 92 - Nov. 94 - Messages Per Month

Source: Internet Society

Month # of Messages
Nov. 92 279,060,000
Dec. 92 262,320,000
Jan. 93 286,920,000
Feb. 93 317,616,667
Mar. 93 363,180,000
Apr. 93 352,410,000
May 93 410,700,000

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Email Details

Jun. 93 371,700,000
Jul. 93 383,340,000
Aug. 93 397,860,000
Sep. 93 421,320,000
Oct. 93 479,853,333
Nov. 93 508,980,000
Dec. 93 469,370,000
Jan. 94 516,540,000
Feb. 94 527,170,000
Mar. 94 636,140,000
Apr. 94 695,220,000
May 94 731,220,000
Jun. 94 747,960,000
Jul. 94 765,840,000
Aug. 94 803,100,000
Sep. 94 899,400,000
Oct. 94 1,033,920,000
Nov. 94 1,007,590,000

Junk Email
■ "Is the Junk Mail Problem Disappearing?" contains different numbers and time-series
analysis of the junk email.

Other Information
■ Mail.com has 14.4 million e-mail boxes, which require 27 terabytes of storage.
Source: Network World, Network Storage White Paper
■ 300 million e-mails are sent per day in the US.
Source: Thomas Staffing of California
■ Today's users send about 15 messages a day and receive about 20 a day, on average. This
colume is expected to grow by some 60% and 80% respectively over the next year.
Source: Ferris Research
■ Electronic mailboxes will more than double in the next two years to an estimated 112 million
in 1999.
Source: Electronic Mail & Messaging Systems
■ UC Berkeley's average message size in August, 2000 was 18,517 bytes, with median size of
1863 bytes.

Final Thoughts

Based on the information above, 500 to 600 billion email messages in 2000 seems to be a
reasonable non-inflated estimate [though it might be lower than the actual number]. While the
average size of email message is hard to tell, we can predict the volume of storage needed from the
data above. For example, Mail.com uses 27 terabytes of storage space for its 14.4 million email

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Email Details
boxes, and the number of email boxes can be estimated to be between 450 and 500 million. With
the average of 475 million email boxes in 2000, the volume of storage needed can be estimated at
900 terabytes, which is lower than the number obtained by multiplying the number of messages by
their [probable] average size. The explanation may be that this is the amount of messages stored,
not the measure of flow.

© 2000 Regents of the University of California

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Internet Growth Data

Source: Hobbes' Internet Timeline

URL:
http://info.isoc.org/guest/zakon/Internet/History/HIT.html

Date Hosts Date Hosts Networks Domains

Dec-69 4 Jul-89 130,000 650 3,900
Jun-70 9 Oct-89 159,000 837
Oct-70 11 Oct-90 313,000 2,063 9,300
Dec-70 13 Jan-91 376,000 2,338
Apr-71 23 Jul-91 535,000 3,086 16,000
Oct-72 31 Oct-91 617,000 3,556 18,000
Jan-73 35 Jan-92 727,000 4,526
Jun-74 62 Apr-92 890,000 5,291 20,000
Mar-77 111 Jul-92 992,000 6,569 16,300
Dec-79 188 Oct-92 1,136,000 7,505 18,100
Aug-81 213 Jan-93 1,313,000 8,258 21,000
May-82 235 Apr-93 1,486,000 9,722 22,000
Aug-83 562 Jul-93 1,776,000 13,767 26,000
Oct-84 1,024 Oct-93 2,056,000 16,533 28,000
Oct-85 1,961 Jan-94 2,217,000 20,539 30,000
Feb-86 2,308 Jul-94 3,212,000 25,210 46,000
Nov-86 5,089 Oct-94 3,864,000 37,022 56,000
Dec-87 28,174 Jan-95 4,852,000 39,410 71,000
Jul-88 33,000 Jul-95 6,642,000 61,538 120,000
Oct-88 56,000 Jan-96 9,472,000 93,671 240,000
Jan-89 80,000 Jul-96 12,881,000 134,365 488,000
Jan-97 16,146,000 828,000
Jul-97 19,540,000 1,301,000

Notes: Hosts = a computer system with registered IP address;

Domain = registered domain name (with name server
record)

A more accurate survey mechanism was produced in 1999, new and corrected numbers are shown
below:

Date Hosts Date Hosts Date Hosts

Jan-95 5,846,000 Jan-97 21,819,000 Jan-9943,230,000
Jul-95 8,200,000 Jul-97 26,053,000 Jul-9956,218,000
Jan-96 14,352,000 Jan-98 29,670,000 Jan-0072,398,092
Jul-96 16,729,000 Jul-98 36,739,000

Note: the original source for the data above is: Network Wizards Internet Domain
Survey

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URL: ftp://ftp.nw.com/pub/zone/WWW-9807/top.html

This statistics is also reproduced at the following locations:

1. Internet Statistics: Growth and Usage of the Web and the Internet
URL: http://www.mit.edu/people/mkgray/net/
2. Internet Software Consortsium: Internet Domain Survey
URL: http://www.isc.org/ds/

Source: The NSFNET Backbone Project,

1987-1995
URL:
ftp://nic.merit.edu/statistics/nsfnet/index.html

Date Networks Date Networks Date Networks

Jul-88 217 Nov-90 2125 Mar-93 10498
Aug-88 241 Dec-90 2190 Apr-93 11252
Sep-88 292 Jan-91 2338 May-93 12349
Oct-88 305 Feb-91 2417 Jun-93 13170
Nov-88 334 Mar-91 2501 Jul-93 14121
Dec-88 346 Apr-91 2622 Aug-93 15160
Jan-89 384 May-91 2763 Sep-93 16696
Feb-89 410 Jun-91 2982 Oct-93 17979
Mar-89 467 Jul-91 3086 Nov-93 19664
Apr-89 516 Aug-91 3258 Dec-93 21430
May-89 564 Sep-91 3389 Jan-94 23494
Jun-89 603 Oct-91 3556 Feb-94 25706
Jul-89 650 Nov-91 3751 Mar-94 28578
Aug-89 745 Dec-91 4305 Apr-94 30626
Sep-89 809 Jan-92 4526 May-94 32370
Oct-89 837 Feb-92 4740 Jun-94 34051
Nov-89 897 Mar-92 4976 Jul-94 36153
Dec-89 927 Apr-92 5291 Aug-94 38307
Jan-90 1233 May-92 5515 Sep-94 39977
Feb-90 1290 Jun-92 5739 Oct-94 41520
Mar-90 1356 Jul-92 6031 Nov-94 42883
Apr-90 1525 Aug-92 6385 Dec-94 44689
May-90 1580 Sep-92 6640 Jan-95 46318
Jun-90 1639 Oct-92 7354 Feb-95 48514
Jul-90 1727 Nov-92 7854 Mar-95 50344
Aug-90 1894 Dec-92 8561 Apr-95 50766
Sep-90 1988 Jan-93 9117
Oct-90 2063 Feb-93 9604

Date Hosts Date Domains

Aug-81 213 Jul-88 900

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 Aug-83 562 Jul-89 3,900
Oct-85 1,961 Oct-90 9,300
Dec-87 28,174 Jul-91 16,000
Oct-89 159,000 Oct-92 18,100
Oct-90 313,000 Oct-93 28,000
Oct-91 617,000 Oct-94 56,000
Oct-92 1,136,000 Jul-95 120,000
Oct-93 2,056,000 Jul-96 488,000
Oct-94 3,864,000 Jul-97 1,301,000
Jul-95 6,642,000
Jul-96 12,881,000
Jul-97 19,540,000

Source: NetSizer
URL: http://www.netsizer.com/

Estimate of the number of web hosts (As of Jul 21, 2000): 86.437
millions

Source: Domain Stats

URL: http://www.domainstats.com/

Total domains registered worldwide (As of Jul 21, 2000): 17,804,717

Source: Center for Next Generation Internet

URL:
http://www.ngi.org/trends.htm

Annual hosts growth rate: 63%

100 million hosts by the end of
Predictions:
2000
1 billion hosts by 2005
69 new hosts per
Expansion:
minute
23 new domains per minute
Contains detailed statistics by
country

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WWW Growth Data

Source: Hobbes' Internet Timeline

URL:
http://info.isoc.org/guest/zakon/Internet/History/HIT.html

Date Sites Date Sites Date Sites

Jun-93 130 May-97 1,044,163 Dec-98 3,689,227
Sep-93 204 Jun-97 1,117,255 Jan-99 4,062,280
Oct-93 228 Jul-97 1,203,096 Feb-99 4,301,512
Dec-93 623 Aug-97 1,269,800 Mar-99 4,389,131
Jun-94 2,738 Sep-97 1,364,714 Apr-99 5,040,663
Dec-94 10,022 Oct-97 1,466,906 May-99 5,414,325
Jun-95 23,500 Nov-97 1,553,998 Jun-99 6,177,453
Jan-96 100,000 Dec-97 1,681,868 Jul-99 6,598,697
Jun-96 252,000 Jan-98 1,834,710 Aug-99 7,078,194
Jul-96 299,403 Feb-98 1,920,933 Sep-99 7,370,929
Aug-96 342,081 Mar-98 2,084,473 Oct-99 8,115,828
Sep-96 397,281 Apr-98 2,215,195 Nov-99 8,844,573
Oct-96 462,047 May-98 2,308,502 Dec-99 9,560,866
Nov-96 525,906 Jun-98 2,410,067 Jan-00 9,950,491
Dec-96 603,367 Jul-98 2,594,622 Feb-0011,161,811
Jan-97 646,162 Aug-98 2,807,588 Mar-0013,106,190
Feb-97 739,688 Sep-98 3,156,324 Apr-0014,322,950
Mar-97 883,149 Oct-98 3,358,969 May-0015,049,382
Apr-97 1,002,512 Nov-98 3,518,158 Jun-0017,119,262

Source: article "Accessibility of Information on the Web"

URL: n/a, only a printed copy is available

Note: all numbers below refer to publicly indexable web pages; publicly indexable web pages exclude pages
that are not normally considered for indexing by web search engines, such as pages with authorization
requirements(including firewalls), pages excluded from indexing using the robots exclusion standard,
dynamic pages, etc;

at least 320 million

December, 1997:
pages;

February, 1999: 2.8 million servers on the publicly indexable web;

289 average pages per server;
800 million publicly indexable web pages;
18.7 kilobytes is the mean size of a page;

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 3.9 kbytes is the median size of a page;
February, 1999, 7.3 - kbytes average size of the textual content [after removing HTML
continued: tags, comments, and extra white space];
0.98 kbytes - median size of the textual content;
15 terabytes of pages is the amount of data on the publicly indexable
web;
6 terabytes is the amount of text
data;
62.8 images per web server;
15.2 kbytes - average image size;
5.5 kbytes - median image size;
180 million images on the publicly indexable web;
3 terabytes - total amount of image data;

Note: the distribution of pages on web servers is extremely skewed, following a universal power law; many
sites have few pages, and a few sites have vast numbers of pages, which limits the accuracy of the estimates
above; the true value could be higher because of very rare sites that have millions of pages (for example,
GeoCities reportedly has 34 million pages), or because some sites could not be crawled completely because
of errors;

Source: "Size of the Web: A Dynamic Essay for a Dynamic Medium"

URL:
http://censorware.org/web_size/

As of 7/5/2000, the Web has

2,170,000,000 pages;
roughly:
40,800,000,000,000 bytes of text;
489,000,000 images;
8,160,000,000,000 bytes of image
data.

In the last 24 hours, the Web has added: 4,420,000 new pages;
82,800,000,000 new bytes of text;
994,000 new images; and
16,600,000,000 new bytes of image
data.
49,400,000 pages changed; and
11,100,000 images changed.

Average lifespan of the Web page: 44 days;

Source: "The Truth About the Web Crawling Towards Eternity"

URL:
www.alexa.com/company/internet_stats.html

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Note: Published in Web Techniques Magazine, May 1997,
Issue 5

How many Web sites are there?

One million Web-site names are in common usage.
There are about 450,000 unique host machines.
If you request the top page from these 450,000, about 300,000 will return one within reasonable
time. The rest appear to be intermittent or archaic.
About 95 percent of the 300,000 servers are "up" at any given time.

How big is the Web?

Note: "We estimate there are 80 million HTML pages on the public Web as of January 1997. The figure is
fuzzy because some sites are entirely dynamic (a database generates pages in response to clicks or queries).
The typical Web page has 15 links (HREFs) to other pages or objects and five sourced objects (SRC), such as
sounds or images." Moreover:

The typical HTML page is 5

kbytes;
The typical image (GIF or JPEG) is 12 kbytes;
The average object served via HTTP is 15
kbytes;
The typical Web site is about 20 percent HTML, 80 percent images, sounds, and executables (by
size in bytes);

"The upshot of this data is that it takes about 400 GB to store the text of a snapshot of the public Web and
about 2000 GB (2 TB) to store nontext files."

How big are individual Web sites?

The median size for a Web site is about 300 pages; only 50 sites have more than 30,000 pages.
About 5 percent of all servers have a robot.txt file (for governing how crawlers visit).
About 1 percent of all servers have a sitelist.txt file (to aid site mapping and robot revisiting).

How fast is the Web growing?

The size of the Web is doubling yearly, but this statistic is losing its meaning because of the
growth of dynamic sites.
The typical Web page is only about two months old.
Dynamic sites are becoming a significant presence; JavaScript is widespread, Java much less so,
but growing.

Note: "Facts above are mostly based on data gathered by Internet Archive, but augmented with some stats
from Larry Page of Stanford University and public documents from the Web."
Author: Z Smith

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Source: Measuring the Web
URL: http://www5conf.inria.fr/fich_html/papers/P9/Overview.html

What is the "average page" like? (as of May,

1996)
Mean size: 6518
Median size: 2021
SD: 31678

Source: "The Web: Growing by 2 Million Pages a Day"

URL:
www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,12329,00.html
Author: David Lake
Published in: The Industry Standard Magazine, February
28, 2000

Estimated Growth per Day

Metric 1999 Total
1998-1999
Web pages 1,500,000,000 1,917,808
Hosts 72,398,092 79,913
Domain Names 8,100,000 12,981
Unique Web Sites 3,649,000 4,422

Cumulative Domain Name Registrations in the .com, .net, .org Domains

(Millions)
Year Existing New
1993 0 0.01
1994 0.01 0.03
1995 0.04 0.16
1996 0.2 0.4
1997 0.6 0.9
1998 1.6 1.8
1999 3.4 4.7

Web Site Growth Trend (Millions)

Online Computer
Year Alexa Internet
Library Center
1997 1.2n/a
1998 2 2.5
1999 3.6 3.4
2000 n/a n/a
2001 n/a 10

Number of Hosts in the Domain Name System (Millions)

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 Year Number of Hosts
1995 5.8
1996 14.4
1997 21.8
1998 29.7
1999 43.2
2000 72.4

Source: Inktomi Corp: Web Surpasses One Billion

Documents
URL:
http://www.inktomi.com/new/press/billion.html

Jan 18, 2000: Inktomi announces that WWW surpassed 1 billion pages; This figure also coincides with
Internet Archive's (www.archive.org) estimate. Internet Archive also says that these 1 billion pages
correspond to 13.8 terabytes of text-only data, with a rate of growth 2 terabytes per month;

Source: Online Computer Library Center June 1999 Web Statistics

URL:
http://www.oclc.org/oclc/research/projects/webstats/statistics.htm

Number of IP addresses in 32-bit address

4,294,967,296
space:
Number of IP addresses in the 0,1% random sample: 4,294,967
4,882,000 (+/-
Number of Web Sites:
3%)
3,649,000 (+/-
Number of Unique Web Sites:
3%)
2,229,000 (+/-
Number of Public Web Sites:
4%)
389,000 (+/-
Number of Private Web Sites:
10%)
1,031,000 (+/-
Number of Provisional Web Sites:
6%)
288,221,000
Number of Web Pages:
(+/- 35%)
Number of Files: 500,491,000

Web Growth
1997 1998 1999
Web Sites: 1,570,000 2,851,000 4,882,000
Unique Sites: 1,230,000 2,035,000 3,649,000
Unique Public Sites: 800,000 1,457,000 2,229,000
% Change: 97 to 98 98 to 99 97 to 99

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Web Sites: 82 71 211
Unique Sites: 65 79 197
Unique Public Sites: 82 53 179

Web Volatility: 44%

(IP addresses identifying a Web site in 1998 that no longer identify a Web site in 1999)

Explanation of the Statistics

The 32-bit Internet Protocol address space consists of 4,294,967,296 unique IP addresses. A 0.1% random
sample (without replacement) was taken from this address space, resulting in 4,294,967 unique IP addresses.
An attempt was made to connect to each of the sample addresses on Port 80.

Web Site
Identified by an IP address that returns a response code of 200 and a Web page in reply to an HTTP request
for the home page.

Unique Web Sites

It is not uncommon for the same Web site to be duplicated at multiple IP addresses (e.g., for server load
distribution purposes). To ensure that each unique Web site has the same probability of being selected for the
sample, the following rule was followed: if a site is located at multiple IP addresses, the site is retained in the
sample only if the numerically lowest IP address is in the sample. Three diagnostic tests were developed to
assist in identifying sites with multiple IP addresses. A description of these tests is available in the paper A
Methodology for Sampling the World Wide Web.

Public Web Sites

A public Web site offers content that, from a general perspective, is meaningful and non-trivial, and is freely
accessible without fee payment or prior authorization.

Private Web Sites

A private Web site requires payment or prior authorization to access its content; typically, a private site will
not permit free access beyond its home page.

Provisional Web Sites

A provisional Web site is in a transitory or unfinished state, and/or offers only content that from a general
perspective, is meaningless or trivial.

Web Pages
According to the W3C Working Draft "Web Terminology & Definitions Sheet" (May 24, 1999), a Web page
is defined as:
A collection of information, consisting of one or more Web resources, intended to be rendered
simultaneously, and identified by a single URI. More specifically, a Web page consists of a Web resource
with zero, one, or more embedded Web resources intended to be rendered as a single unit, and referred to by
the URI of the one Web resource which is not embedded.
The key point in this definition is that a Web page often is a composite object, consisting of multiple Web
resources: e.g., text, images, applets, etc. The Web page is the single entity representing the combination of

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these resources.

For each unique public Web site, a harvesting agent was used to download and store all text-based files
internal to the site. Harvested files had one of the following extensions:

.asc .asp .dhtm .dhtml

.ephtm .ephtml .htm .html
.jsp .mhtm .mhtml .php
.php3 .phtm .phtml .shtm
.shtml .text .tx8 .txt

In addition, files with no extension and those identified implicitly in the URL - i.e., URLs whose path ends
with a directory, and the server automatically loads the correct file when the URL is accessed - were also
harvested.
Duplicate pages on the same site were eliminated. Elimination of duplicate pages was conducted strictly on
an intra-site basis, and was not extended across sites.
Once the de-duping process was completed, the remaining files were processed by software that counted the
number of Web pages present on each Web site. For a given Web site, Web pages fell into one of two
categories:
1. the harvested pages
2. references in the harvested pages to other Web pages internal to the Web site, through the HTML <a
href="..."> convention.

The counting algorithm was configured so that a Web page with frames is counted only once, rather than
multiple times for each constituent part of the frame.

Number of Files
An estimate of the number of files located at public Web sites can also be obtained from the harvest data. For
each public Web site, files were identified as one of the following:
1. harvested files
2. references in the harvested files to other files internal to the Web site, through the HTML <a href="...">
convention.
3. references in the harvested files to images internal to the Web site, through the HTML <img src="...">
convention.
4. references in the harvested files to applets internal to the Web site, through the HTML <applet code="..."
codebase="..."> convention.

Source: Cyveillance's "Sizing the Internet"

URL: http://www.cyveillance.com/resources/Sizing_the_Internet_whitepaper.pdf

Number of unique pages on

2.1 billion
Internet:
Unique pages added per day: 7.3 million

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 10,060
Average size of pages:
bytes
Average number of images on a
14.38
page:

Source: Cyveillance Corp.

URL: http://www.cyveillance.com/resources/facts.asp#5

Web grows by 300,000 pages every 5 days (Original source: Lycos)

The amount of Web pages is estimated to grow seven-fold to 7.7 billion by 2002.
(Source: IDC)

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/how-much-info/internet/rawdata.html (11 of 11) [11/10/2000 2:11:51 PM]