Destined To Become Quaint

This quote, “Given the historic price-performance trajectories for storage, in a few years at least some high-end appliances will house hundreds, if not thousands, of books simultaneously, and certainly laptops with software book readers will house thousands or tens of thousands of books at once.”, from The Future of the Book article mentioned yesterday, is destined to become quaint.

Just like quotes from 1981 that say “someday everyone may have a computer with 100MB of storage”. I would bet that, with good compression, you could probably house tens of thousands of books on a laptop today. Assuming 100K per compressed book, you can fit 100,000 on a 10GB drive.