[______-]

How much data was the Library of Alexandria? A gigabyte? I ask because I see sites disappearing off the net all the time. I've even seen sites being shut down because of the pandemic. Some people got COVID and were financially drained and couldn't afford the $15.00 it takes to renew a domain along with a bare minimum hosting bundle. It's very sad to witness. Archive.org's Wayback Machine is doing a great job, but even that is problematic since we don't know how long even that will be around, and we might need an archival site that backs up Wayback!

[jhgb]

I'd guesstimate that a scroll could contain something like 33 kB of text (in modern equivalent single-byte encoding with inter-word spaces), since the Iliad is divided into 24 "books" (presumably scrolls - the division may even have taken place in Alexandria itself!), has around 120000 characters, and the average Greek word length as per https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1076/jqul.8.3.175.409... is around 5.5 (add 1 for inter-word spaces). Assuming there were 400000 of such scrolls in the library (that seems to be a higher end estimate), it comes out as something like 12 GB.

[marc_abonce]

I imagine that the biggest bulk of data would come from illustrations, though. The first example that occurs to me is Euclid's Elements.

[jhgb]

That would probably depend on what percentage of scrolls contained illustrations in the first place.

[zozbot234]

Apparently, the whole Library of Congress collection would take up 10 petabytes of storage, give or take. So the size of the Library of Alexandria can be very roughly assessed at 1.2 microLoC's.

[steelbrain]

Some archives store books in image format in addition to text, is that 10 petabytes of pure text?

[AlotOfReading]

The LoC has extensive media collections besides the books. The textual collection is on the order of 10 terabytes of data though, not petabytes.

[sasaf5]

For a moment I was wondering what a micro Line of Code is... then I noticed the mention to the Library of Congress.

[______-]

Thanks, wow you could keep it on a 16gb USB flash drive!

[slver]

Comparing the Library of Alexandria with random web sites is unwarranted. Libraries are curated.

And websites who can't afford hosting, and there's hosting for $5 these days, BTW, self-curate themselves out of existence.

[Hayarotle]

> And websites who can't afford hosting, and there's hosting for $5 these days, BTW, self-curate themselves out of existence.

It is not a given that the more a website can afford hosting the better quality they are. For example, many good-quality websites die because the webmasters themselves died (and thus cannot keep hosting the website), and meanwhile there are endless examples of SEO-bait content farms that provide little value, but can easily afford hosting.

This means this "self curation" ends up curating for newer websites better ranked in search engines, which would be the online analogue of libraries having no books from before 2000, and being full of modern day magazines and newspapers of dubious quality. Were Beowulf a website, how long would its owner be able to host it?

[jhgb]

> Libraries are curated.

Generally, yes. But does Library of Alexandria count as such if officials were confiscating all the books on ships arriving to Alexandria, putting them in the library, and only returning copies to the ship crews and passengers (once these were furnished)? To me, Library of Alexandria in a way was the Internet Archive of the ancient world.

[cperciva]

It was curated, but not by the Librarians of Alexandria. The curation was done by travellers who decided that particular books were important enough to bring with them.

[saalweachter]

Incidentally I've imagined the Librarians scrambling to grab books from the shelves as the Library burned, and wondered if they would have actually "saved" anything.

The idea being, anything the librarians thought worth saving probably existed in other libraries, and would be more likely to have multiple copies survive to this day. Meanwhile, if they grabbed some book of third-tier poetry at random, that would be more likely to be a unique volume.

[jhgb]

Along the same lines you could argue that any book collection is being curated by writers, as it's the writers who decide what books are important enough to write.

[______-]

> Comparing the Library of Alexandria with random web sites is unwarranted. Libraries are curated

I wasn't trying to compare, just making an analogy / metaphor. As in: how many libraries of Alexandria do we lose each day on the web? Because it it's too high a number, then the web is fundamentally broken.

> And websites who can't afford hosting, and there's hosting for $5 these days, BTW, self-curate themselves out of existence

But it shouldn't have to be like that. I've seen some real gems out there that disappeared and weren't backed up on Wayback. Literally all the owner needed was $5 as you say and the site could continue.

[dasyatidprime]

There's some complexifiers to this that seem worth recognizing, especially since the "financially drained" that was mentioned was pandemic-related and therefore is likely part of a broader cluster of problems:

1. $5 and tail risk. Even if your financial hardship isn't that bad, if it's still making things more unpredictable, that could be $5 plus a cascade of overdraft fees one day. If things are worse, of course, it could also be your last meal for the month, or your last chance to not go homeless. Better get rid of any expense you can.

2. $5 and executive function. The payment card you were using expired. Are you going to remember to update the info when you're in constant low-grade panic or depression?

3. Relatedly to (2), $5 if you can get to that point in the first place. Maybe you had your site hosted on something more expensive, for… whatever reason. Now you have to remember how to transfer all the files and hope everything still works, and so on.

4. Kind of like (3), $5 except for the more-expensive domain name that seemed like a good idea at the time. Oops. Where are you going to move to? Will anyone be able to find it afterwards anyway?

5. $5 and relationship overhead. Which of these five-dollar hosters are trustworthy? Will they stay that way?

There's probably more.

If we care about preserving the independent Web, these sorts of problems definitely present themselves over the long run. I'm theoretically an affluent-by-many-standards technologist, but I've had issues over time that resulted in my previous sites going splat and just… couldn't really pull together what it would take to revive them, and wasn't that motivated. Decentralization of maintenance-energy overall while having individual sites relying on one or a few people has real inefficiencies that way if permanency is valuable.

[slver]

> As in: how many libraries of Alexandria do we lose each day on the web? Because it it's too high a number, then the web is fundamentally broken.

If your brain remembered every piece of information it stumbled upon, you'd cease to function before your first birthday.

Your computer would be out of RAM before it gets past its BIOS check.

And your HDD would get filled to capacity in less than a week and become inoperable.

The web doesn't have to preserve everything. 99% of everything is garbage, and I'm being conservative. Forgetting is an essential capability, and we should focus on quality, not quantity.

[wolverine876]

Ironically, you've said something worth remembering.

[slver]

It's fine, we reinvent it every day from first principles.

[nindalf]

It's possible to set up static hosting for free. I actually saved $5 (+1$ tax) a month by doing that.

[generalizations]

Relatedly, did we ever figure out what was in that collection? I vaguely remember hearing that the book list was recovered.