[compman775]

Um . . . when you download an ebook onto the Kindle, does the Kindle somehow gain energy? Where would the energy come from? Wouldn't it just . . . come from the energy already stored in the Kindle? If anything, wouldn't charging a Kindle increase it's mass instead of downloading information onto it? (I don't know, but . . .)

[ewoodrich]

Not really.

Most NAND flash use floating gate-mosfets (a type of transistor), which work by storing a very small amount of electricity within a high resistance material to prevent dissipation when in the "on-state". But this charge is extremely negligible in terms of mass, and energy. And depending on the particular memory used, the "off-state" could carry a charge as well.

Interesting to think about though.

(and to clarify, this energy is coming from the device's battery, not the RF energy or something else OTA)

[electromagnetic]

A charged battery is merely an imbalance of electrons. It's like a stored water power system. You put water in a reservoir on the top of the hill and open the tap and let it run into the reservoir at the bottom. When the upper reservoir is empty, your system still has as much water as it did before it just has no potential to generate power until you pump it back up the hill.

What they're saying is that the electrons captured to change the state in a solid-state drive holds physical mass. If this mass change is extrapolated to the data storage of the entire internet, then it physically ways as much as a strawberry.

This likely means that all recorded data in human history would weigh less than your standard package of printer paper from Staples.

[gujk]

Of course, if you wrote down all of knowledge on paper, and discounted the mass of the paper and ink that holds the information, the actual information content--the arrangement of the ink--weighs nothing.

[hammock]

It comes from the battery! Which gets charged by the wall outlet, and so forth. Consider the "kindle weight" as independent from the battery's weight.