[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!