I thought what was interesting about Nick Bilton's NY Times story was its headline: "Part of the Daily American Diet, 34 Gigabytes of Data." OK, we're info hogs; we can quantify it; the number is soaring, etc. But talk about burying the lead: we now have a word for a VERY BIG NUMBER: a zettabyte, or, start counting now, and continue into infinity, a billion trillion. Sounds like something a three-year-old would say, no?
Collectively, American households consumed 3.6 zettabytes of information of all kinds in 2008, the researchers estimated.
A zettabyte is equal to one billion trillion bytes: a 1 with 21 zeros at the end. A single zettabyte is equivalent to 100 billion copies of all the books in the Library of Congress, or as the report says, seven layers of textbooks covering the continental United States and Alaska.