Gutenberg Galaxy
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Template:Mergeto The Gutenberg Galaxy, named for Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of printing, is the universe of all printed books ever published. The term was first used by Marshall McLuhan in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man first published in 1962.
As an estimate of the size of the Gutenberg Galaxy, as of 2004/2005, the British Library claimed that it held more than 97 million items, and the Library of Congress claimed that it held approximately 130 million items. It is not easy to estimate how many of these "items" are printed books (or even to define "book"), and belong in the Gutenberg Galaxy. The British Library, for example, claimed it held 13.3 million monographs [1]. The Library of Congress claimed it held "more than 29 million books" [2].
Given an estimated average book size of 6 Mbytes for a purely textual book containing 1 million words, for the Library of Congress this represents roughly 174,000,000,000,000 bytes (174 × 1012 bytes = 174,000 GB = 174 Terrabyte; see SI prefix) of text. If we assume the same book size to the monographs in the British Library (13.3 million), we get 79,800,000,000,000 bytes or 79.8 TB for the books in its holdings. If we ignore duplicate holdings (probably high, in the order of 25–50%), the combined size of the Gutenberg Galaxy by this method would be around 0.25 Petabytes which is around 1,000 hard disks with 250 Gigabytes each.