After I built my own streaming service I decided to buy an E-reader and needed some books to put on it. Long story short, after rooting around in some hard drives and picking up available copies of free epubs from around the web, I currently have 91,000 books in my library and believe I have another 150,000 to 270,000 to add in.

This is made up of 20,000 books in my Calibre library, 71,000 books that I obtained from the Gutenberg Library and I have tens of thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands of books to add. I have a copy of the Survivor’s library and also was able to obtain 1tb of history books, as well as the English edition of Wikipedia, which at this moment has 6.4 million articles in it.

Based on my math, if I read 2 books per week or 104 books per year, it would take me 875 years to read 91,000 books or in other words, it would take 10 very long lifetimes to read them all.

If I estimate that I have about 367,000 books total it would take me about 3500 years at 2 books per week to read them all or 40 lifetimes to read. Put another way if I started reading 2 books per week today I wouldn’t be done until the year 5523.

This is what it means to live in the “information age”. The next step in the process would be to clean up the data and have a computer (chatgpt style ai) read it so I could ask it questions about the information in the database. I expect this will become easier over time and I look forward to being able to have a computer make sense of everything that I’ve collected.