Digital Info Explosion Doesn’t Save Trees

NEW YORK (Reuters) – All those e-mails — junk or otherwise — are
adding up.
In 2002, people around the globe created enough new information to fill
500,000 U.S. Libraries of Congress, according to a study by faculty and
students at the University of California at Berkeley.

The 5 billion gigabytes of new data works out to about 800 megabytes
per person — the equivalent of a stack of books 30 feet high — the
study by the university’s School of Information Management and Systems
found.

Although film-based photographs have dropped 9 percent since1999, paper
documents, including books, journals, and others, have grown by as much
as 43 percent. Lyman said that much of the content is accessed on computers,
but users print it out.

from Reuters