2007-04-02 06:23:26 · 3 answers · asked by Anonymous in Arts & Humanities ➔ Books & Authors
millions
2007-04-02 06:32:41 · answer #1 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 1⤋
Difficult to answer. How many books, manuscripts, scrolls and tablets we have never heard of, were destroyed or are still waiting to be discovered? We don't know.
We can only guess how many works disappeared when the first Chinese emperor ordered the burning of most Confucian books.
How many works still have to be excavated, restored and deciphered at the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum? We can only guess.
We don't know how many works were destroyed at the burning of the Royal Library of Alexandria. Rough estimates are between 500,000 and 1 million.
The only reliable numbers start only with the arrival of the printing press.
And now with in the digital age, counting is becoming difficult again. Just last year (2006) about 161 billion gigabytes of digital data was produced, equal to around 12 stacks of books that reach from the Earth to the sun.
2007-04-02 07:14:39 · answer #2 · answered by Erik Van Thienen 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
lol
2007-04-02 07:08:57 · answer #3 · answered by Ethan 2 · 0⤊ 1⤋