Comment by cgh
6 hours ago
The Vatican Library contains roughly 1.1 million printed books and around 75,000 codices, only a small percentage of which have been digitised.
6 hours ago
The Vatican Library contains roughly 1.1 million printed books and around 75,000 codices, only a small percentage of which have been digitised.
Which is what percent of the world’s content? 0.000000001% or something similar. It’s nothing in the scheme of things. To put it another way, if we were to digitize that continent and train on it, our AIs would not get noticeably better in any way. It doesn’t move the needle.
1.1 million being 0.000000001% implies a total count of 1e17 books in the world - the real number is closer to 1e8.
Way to miss the point. That said, we’re not just talking about books, whatever that might mean. We’re talking about all documents ever made. Every magazine article, every blog and web page, every Word doc, etc. I’m pretty sure that whatever is in the Vatican archives is tiny by comparison. Given the age of the Vatican archives, I can also guarantee that many of those “books” are nothing more than page fragments. Very few will be full codices or long scrolls. Many will date before the printing press when document production was slow and laborious.