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Update: A newer version of this study has been released.
Please See: How Much Information 2003.
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Senior Researchers: Peter Lyman and Hal R. Varian
Research Assistants: James Dunn, Aleksey Strygin, Kirsten Swearingen

This study is an attempt to measure how much information is produced in the world each year. We look at several media and estimate yearly production, accumulated stock, rates of growth, and other variables of interest.

If you want to understand what we've done, we offer different recommendations, depending on the degree to which you suffer from information overload:

Heavy information overload: the world's total yearly production of print, film, optical, and magnetic content would require roughly 1.5 billion gigabytes of storage. This is the equivalent of 250 megabytes per person for each man, woman, and child on earth.

Moderate information overload: read the Sound Bytes and look at the Charts illustrating our findings.

Normal information overload: read the Executive Summary.

Information deprived: read the detailed reports by clicking on the contents to your left. Or download the entire Web site as a PDF file. (It is about 200 pages long.)

This study was produced by faculty and students at the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from EMC. We have put "[???]" in the text where we had to make "questionable" assumptions. If you have suggestions, corrections, or comments, please send email to how-much-info@sims.berkeley.edu. We view this as a "living document" and intend to update it based on such contributions. Preferred citation: Lyman, Peter and Hal R. Varian, "How Much Information", 2000. Retrieved from http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/how-much-info on [date]. Here is a Japanese translation.