accurate caption for any photo: Tom Simonite, “Google Creates Software That Tells You What It Sees in Images,” MIT Technology Review, November 18, 2014.
Industrial robots cost $100,000-plus: Angelo Young, “Industrial Robots Could Be 16% Less Costly to Employ Than People by 2025,” International Business Times, February 11, 2015.
four times that amount over a lifespan: Martin Haegele, Thomas Skordas, Stefan Sagert, et al., “Industrial Robot Automation,” White Paper FP6-001917, European Robotics Research Network, 2005.
Priced at $25,000: Angelo Young, “Industrial Robots Could Be 16% Less Costly to Employ Than People by 2025,” International Business Times, February 11, 2015.
all but seven minutes of a typical flight: John Markoff, “Planes Without Pilots,” New York Times, April 6, 2015.
3: FLOWING
steady flow of household replenishables: “List of Online Grocers,” Wikipedia, accessed August 18, 2015.
new medium imitates the medium it replaces: Marshall McLuhan, Culture Is Our Business (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970).
top ten music videos: “List of Most Viewed YouTube Videos,” Wikipedia, accessed August 18, 2015.
about $2.26 per download: “Did Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’ Honesty Box Actually Damage the Music Industry?,” NME, October 15, 2012.
create a chorus from it: Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir, “Lux Aurumque,” March 21, 2010.
containing 30 million tracks of music: “Information,” Spotify, accessed June 18, 2015.
its 250 million fans: Romain Dillet, “SoundCloud Now Reaches 250 Million Visitors in Its Quest to Become the Audio Platform of the Web,” TechCrunch, October 29, 2013.
27 percent of music sales: Joshua P. Friedlander, “News and Notes on 2014 RIAA Music Industry Shipment and Revenue Statistics,” Recording Industry Association of America, 2015, http://goo.gl/Ozgk8f.
Spotify pays 70 percent: “Spotify Explained,” Spotify Artists, 2015.
streaming takeover “is inevitable”: Joan E. Solsman, “Attention, Artists: Streaming Music Is the Inescapable Future. Embrace It,” CNET, November 14, 2014.
hours of music required: Personal estimation.
new podcasts launch every day: Personal correspondence with Todd Pringle, GM and VP of Product, Stitcher, April 26, 2015.
four ways books embody fixity: Nicholas Carr, “Words in Stone and on the Wind,” Rough Type, February 3, 2012.
4: SCREENING
50,000 words in Old English to a million: Robert McCrum, Robert MacNeil, and William Cran, The Story of English, third revised ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 2002); and Encyclopedia Americana, vol. 10 (Grolier, 1999).
romance novel was invented in 1740: Pamela Regis, A Natural History of the Romance Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
three quarters of the towns: Calculation based on approximately 1,700 public libraries and 2,269 places with a population of 2,500 or higher. Florence Anderson, Carnegie Corporation Library Program 1911–1961 (New York: Carnegie Corporation, 1963); Durand R. Miller, Carnegie Grants for Library Buildings, 1890–1917 (New York: Carnegie Corporation, 1943); and “1990 Census of Population and Housing,” U.S. Census Bureau, CPH21, 1990.
5 billion digital screens illuminate our lives: Extrapolation based on “Installed Base of Internet-Connected Video Devices to Exceed Global Population in 2017,” IHS, October 8, 2013.
3.8 billion new additional screens per year: 2014 Total Global Shipments, IHS Display Search; personal communication with Lee Graham, May 1, 2015.
reading scores trended down: “Average SAT Scores of College-Bound Seniors,” College Board, 2015, http://goo.gl/Rbmu0q.
tripled since 1980: Roger E. Bohn and James E. Short, How Much Information? 2009 Report on American Consumers, Global Information Industry Center, University of California, San Diego, 2009.
60 trillion pages: “How Search Works,” Inside Search, Google, 2013.
80 million blog posts per day: Sum of 2 million on WordPress, 78 million on Tumblr: “A Live Look at Activity Across WordPress.com,” WordPress, April 2015; and “About (Posts Today),” Tumblr, accessed August 5, 2015.
500 million quips per day: “About (Tweets Sent Per Day),” Twitter, August 5, 2015.
Some scholars of literature: Sven Birkerts, “Reading in a Digital Age,” American Scholar, March 1, 2010.
Neurological studies show: Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention (New York: Viking, 2009).
screen only one word wide: “Rapid Serial Visual Presentation,” Wikipedia, accessed June 24, 2015.
36 million Kindles and ebook readers: Helen Ku, “E-Ink Forecasts Loss as Ebook Device Demand Falls,” Taipei Times, March 29, 2014.
books that are projected wide and big: Stefan Marti, “TinyProjector,” MIT Media Lab, October 2000–May 2002.
concepts elsewhere in the encyclopedia: “List of Wikipedias,” Wikimedia Meta-Wiki, accessed April 30, 2015.
great library at Alexandria: Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); Andrew Erskine, “Culture and Power in Ptolemaic Egypt: The Library and Museum at Alexandria,” Greece and Rome 42 (1995).
backing up the entire internet: Personal correspondence with Brewster Kahle, 2006.
at least 310 million books: “WorldCat Local,” WorldCat, accessed August 18, 2015.
1.4 billion articles and essays: Ibid.
180 million songs: “Introducing Gracenote Rhythm,” Gracenote, accessed May 1, 2015.
3.5 trillion images: “How Many Photos Have Ever Been Taken?,” 1,000 Memories blog, April 10, 2012, accessed via Internet Archive, May 2, 2015.
330,000 movies: “Database Statistics,” IMDb, May 2015.
1 billion hours of videos, TV shows, and short films: Inferred from “Statistics,” YouTube, accessed August 18, 2015.
60 trillion public web pages: “How Search Works,” Inside Search, Google, 2013.
50-petabyte hard disks: Private communication with Brewster Kahle, 2006.