Text data is measured in bytes, with a kilobyte holding about half a page of text and a megabyte holding about 500 pages. Binary data is made up of bits, with 8 bits making up a byte. The chart shows the amount of text that can be stored in different units of bytes, with a terabyte holding 1 million thick books. The Library of Congress has over 28 million volumes, which would require approximately 28TB of storage space. Portable media storage devices like CDs, DVDs, and Blu-Ray discs can hold millions of pages of text.
While the exact amount of text data in a kilobyte (KB) or megabyte (MB) can vary depending on the nature of a document, a kilobyte can hold approximately half a page of text, while a megabyte holds approximately 500 pages of text . Text in a digital file is converted into binary data that denote letters and numbers using expressions of ones and zeros. Larger files contain more of this data, which in turn is the equivalent of more typed information.
Binary from the bit
Most modern computers are binary systems and work with bits of data. A bit is the most basic unit of information, which can have two states: usually specified as 0 or 1. Long strings of these bits can represent most types of information, including text, images, and music. Pure binary information, however, is of little use to people who haven’t learned to read and write binary. For example, the binary number 11000101110 is equivalent to 1582.
Grouping of bits into bytes
To make data more accessible and simplified, groups of bits are merged into bytes; a byte consists of 8 bits. An 8-bit set was chosen because it provides 256 total possibilities, enough to specify letters, numbers, spaces, punctuation, and other extended characters. This same sentence, for example, is 125 bytes because there are 125 letters, digits, spaces, and punctuation marks. Note that this only represents pure text; some word processing programs include other types of formatting data and thus the file size becomes larger than just the number of characters in the file.
Amount of text
A kilobyte is 1.024 bytes, often rounded to 1.000 for simplicity; while a megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes, or about 1 million. It is estimated that one kilobyte can hold about half of a typed page. Therefore, a full page takes about 2 KB. The following chart illustrates the number of bytes in common terms such as kilobytes and megabytes, and how much text each can store.
Name
Number of bytes
Amount of text
Kilobytes (KB)
210 o 1,024
Page 1 / 2
Megabyte (MB)
220 o 1,048,576
500 pages or 1 thick book
Gigabyte (GB)
230 o 1,073,741,824
500,000 pages or 1,000 thick books
Terabyte (TB)
240 o 1,099,511,627,776
1 million thick books
petabytes
250 o 1,125,899,906,842,624
180 Libraries of Congress
Exabyte
260 o 1,152,921,504,606,846,976
180 thousand Libraries of Congress
Zettabyte
270 o 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424
180 million Libraries of Congress
Yotta exchange
280 o 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176
180 billion Libraries of Congress
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress in Washington DC is said to be the largest library in the world with over 28 million volumes. The numbers listed in the table above are based on the assumption that the average book has 200 pages. This means that approximately 28TB of storage space would be required to save a digital backup of the entire Library of Congress.
Portable media storage
Most Compact Discs (CDs) hold about 750MB, which is roughly equivalent to 375,000 pages of text. Digital Versatile Discs (DVDs) can hold 4.7 GB or 2.3 million pages. Blu-Ray discs can hold 27GB or 13.5 million pages, which is roughly equivalent to the text contained in 67,500 books. Devices like eReaders and tablets often have many gigabytes of storage space, making them ideal for carrying thousands of books.
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