This is what it looks like when you print out ALL of Wikipedia (and it only takes 25 days and 7,473 books!)
-Artist Michael Mandiberg wanted to physically explain online data
-He wrote a software to adapt 11,594,743 Wikipedia articles into book form
-The final count was 7,473 books
-One gigabyte - 1GB - can store about one thousand books
Is it art or a mathematical experiment?
Either way, this is what happens when Wikipedia - the online encyclopedia with an entry for just about everything imaginable - is printed in its entirety.
The project, by New York artist Michael Mandiberg, aimed to physically explain a petabyte, which is one million gigabytes (GB).
One gigabyte - 1GB - can store about one thousand books worth of information.
Books are really useful measurements of knowledge,' Mandiberg told CBS News.
'We have no idea how long it would take us as humans to read though a gigabyte or 50 gigabytes of data, which is about how much information is in the Wikipedia database I was working from.
'But we have (a) clear understanding of how long it would take us to read a book.'
That is how Mandiberg justified adapting Wikipedia into book form.
The final count was 7,473 books.
The artist printed 106 of those books for his installation, and represented the rest by painting them onto a shelf, which is now on display.
Mandiberg hopes the installation - at Denny Gallery in Manhattan's Lower East Side - will bring people some perspective.
'We have no idea how much data is sitting in NSA's server farm, no idea how big Facebook's database is,' Mandiberg told the network.
'We understand it's big, but we don't have a sense of it.
'It's almost impossible for us to have as sense of it.
'This is a way of really understanding how big things are.'
But how did her turn all those online articles into books?
Mandiberg wrote software that downloaded each Wikipedia article - measuring about 50 GB - into a database, and then wrote another program that would organize all of them.
The total was 11,594,743 articles.
All up the process took 25 days.
The collection can be bought for $500,000.
While Mandiberg isn't overly confident the collection will sell as a whole, he believes people will want to buy single volumes, which are priced at $80 each.
