How many bytes of information are there in the library of congress?

Question

And, how long will it be before home computers could store the entire library of congress on it's storage drive(s)? (or can they already)

Answer 1

Printed collection of the U. S. Library of Congress is equivalent to 10 Terabytes. This is 10,000GB. PCs these days come with about 200-250GB drives, so it would take about 40-50 PC drives to hold the complete contents. Note: with compression software, you could probably get the complete contents in to a space of 1.5 Terabytes. Some power users are starting to load their PCs with this much disk drive space, so it's technically possible today.

Note: this is just printed text, and if you want to include images, maps, etc., that requires much more space.

Answer 2

The collections include more than 29 million books and other printed materials, 2.7 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4.8 million maps, and 58 million manuscripts.

Assume a book is 60 chars/line 30 lines/page 400 pages/book.
That is 720k per pook. That would be about 20,880,000,000,000,000 bytes for the books. You figure it out.