How Much Text is in a Kilobyte or Megabyte?

How Much Text is in a Kilobyte or Megabyte?    

A bit is the most basic unit of information. At their most fundamental level, most modern computers operate on binary bits which means that they can have two states, usually specified as a 0 or 1. Long strings of these bits can be used to represent most types of information including text, pictures and music.

Most modern computers are binary systems and therefore, they are particularly well suited to working with bits. Pure binary information, however, is of little use to humans. The binary number 11000101110 is equivalent to 1582; it is obvious that we are much more suited to working with digits and text instead of ones and zeros.

To help make computers more like our language-based way of thinking, groups of bits are joined into bytes. One byte is comprised of 8 bits. A set of 8 bits was chosen because this provides 256 total possibilities which is sufficient for specifying letters, numbers, spaces, punctuation and other extended characters. This very sentence, for example is composed of 125 bytes because there are 125 letters, digits, spaces and punctuation marks. Keep in mind that we are discussing pure text; some word processing programs, include other sorts of formatting data, and therefore the filesizes will be greater than the number of characters in the file.

It is estimated that a kilobyte can accommodate about 1/2 of a typewritten page. Therefore, one full page requires about 2 kilobytes. The chart below illustrates the number of bytes in common terms such as kilobyte and megabyte and how much text could be stored:

Name    number of bytes amount of text
Kilobyte (kB)   2¹⁰ or 1,024    1/2 page     
Megabyte (mB)   2²⁰ or 1,048,576        500 pages or 1 thick book    
Gigabyte (gB)   2³⁰ or 1,073,741,824    500,000 pages or 1,000 thick books   
Terabyte (TB)   2⁴⁰ or 1,099,511,627,776        1,000,000 thick books
Petabyte        2⁵⁰ or 1,125,899,906,842,624    180 Libraries of Congress    
Exabyte 2⁶⁰ or 1,152,921,504,606,846,976        180 thousand Libraries of Congress   
Zettabyte       2⁷⁰ or 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424    180 million Libraries of Congress    
Yottabyte       2⁸⁰ or 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176        180 billion Libraries of Congress    

The Library of Congress in Washington D.C. Is said to be the world's largest library with over 28 million volumes. The numbers listed in the chart above are based on the assumption that the average book has 200 pages.

Most Compact Discs (CD) can hold approximately 750 megabytes (mB) which is roughly equivalent to 375,000 pages of text! DVDs can store 4.7 gigabytes (gB) or 2.3 million pages. The next generation of optical media, Blu-Ray discs, can hold an astonishing 27 gigabytes or 13.5 million pages which is roughly equivalent to the text contained in 67,500 books!

Data Measurement Chart
Data Measurement        Size 
Bit     Single Binary Digit (1 or 0) 
Byte    8 bits
Kilobyte (KB)   1,024 Bytes     or »    8192 bits                                            
Megabyte (MB)   1,024 Kilobytes or »    1048576 Bytes   8388608 Bits                                 
Gigabyte (GB)   1,024 Megabytes or »    1048576 KB      1073741824 Bytes        8589934592 Bits                      
Terabyte (TB)   1,024 Gigabytes or »    1048576 MB      1073741824 KB   1099511627776 Bytes     8796093022208 Bits                   
Petabyte (PB)   1,024 Terabytes or »    1048576 GB      1073741824 MB   1099511627776 KB        1125899906842624 Bytes  9007199254740992 Bits        
Exabyte (EB)    1,024 Petabytes or »    1048576 TB      1073741824 GB   1099511627776 MB        1125899906842624 KB     11522921504606846976 Bytes      9223372036854775808 Bits