Robin Writes

How many books are there in the world? A better question might be ‘How many possible books can be written?’

For the purposes of this experiment, we’ll stick to the English language. We’ll also assume the average length of the books in question is about 100,000 words, a typical novel. If we take all 26 letters in the alphabet (and include a 27th for spaces between them), how many combinations of 100,000 word books is that?

The approximate answer (forgive me for rounding up) is 10^860,000. That’s a one with eight hundred and sixty thousand zeroes after it. That’s a lot of reading. Were I to type it out, the number alone would be about 40,000 times larger than this entire post. It w0uld be larger than one of the novels we’re talking about.

Except of course, we wouldn’t be reading most of those, because there’s going to…