why Robin Quivers is not that smart...

I listen to the Stern show quite a bit. I was listening the other day when they played a recording of a live commercial. It was Howard and Jimmy Kimmel talking about this online backup service called Carbonite. Sounds like a good deal. You can back up all the contents of your PC for 50 dollars a year. They were talking about how much that could possibly be, all the contents of your PC, and how the company didn't care. You could back it ALL up for 50 bucks.
Robin perks up and says, "So, you could store War and Peace, and it wouldn't cost any more..."
War and Peace. That's a big book. But how much storage would it take to back up your digital copy of War and Peace?

Amazon.com lists the hardcover of War and Peace as having 1424 pages. Let's round that up to 1500. A page pulled at random from the book has 588 words on it. Let's round that up to 600. 600x1500 is 900,000. Let's round that up to 1 million.
1 MILLION words. Wow. That's a lot.
Here's it gets a little tricky. There is no way to know how big the words being used in the book are, we can only estimate. But we can estimate generously and say that, on average, the words in the book are all ten characters long. A ten character word is worth 10 bytes. 10x1,000,000=10,000,000.
Or, just about 10MB.
My daughter's dinky MP3 player could hold War and Peace 50 times over.

Say my math is wrong and it's actually 10 times that. 100MB. Say my math is REALLY wrong and it's 100 times that. 1 gig. I have 4 gig on my stupid phone.
Or, maybe Robin is much smarter than I give her credit for and is talking about the digitized reality of an actual physical book. I would need Data to help me figure out the math, then.

Make it so.
Engage.
Number 1.
Come!
Earl Grey, hot.
Indeed.
You suck!