QUESTION: how many
books are in
Borges' "Library of Babel"?
ANSWER: 25
1,312,000 books
- There are 22 letters. The comma, the space, the period. Altogether 25 characters.
- There are no two books alike.
- Each book has 410 pages.
- Each page has 40 lines.
- Each line has 80 characters.
Which is 25
410 x 40 x 80 = 25
1,312,000
this number was too big for my computer to calculate without scaring me that it might melt itself. Just typing out this number would take many pages.
I risked the life of someone else's computer to bring you the following information: 25
1,312,000 when printed out in normal decimal notation is 403 pages long (according to
Microsoft Word (
default settings)). The ~1.8 meg file is available at:
http://yucs.org/~yitz/allbooksinlibraryobabel.txt in case for some ridiculous reason you want the whole thing. (I wouldn't want to have wasted an hour and a half of that computer's lifetime for nothing.) Many thanks to the
Python scripting language which allowed me to calculate this without any fancy
big-number libraries or anything else at all.