150 books. 500,000,000 pages
June 12th, 2008 by Hugh KennedyYesterday was bounded by numbers: not just the usual budgets and estimates and the quick check into one’s 401(k) performance thus far this year (best not to look), but two interesting ones. The first, 150, is the number of books a client’s son is reading between now and September to prepare for his PhD orals.
I’ve run a monthly reading group at the Boston Athenaeum for the past 13 years or so, and it’s now at the point where if I read 15 books in a year I’m not doing badly. So 150 seems, at all these years of remove from graduate school, like a mountain of data.
Ah, but that’s the academic world. Later in the day yesterday, we were asking a prospect how complex the legal cases his company managed could become. He said, “Well, there’s one pharma client in the middle of a large case, and they have 500,000,000 pages of documents.”
Now that’s a pure BtoB number. Astounding amounts of data, written in multiple languages, and framed in specialty language. Five million pounds of paper, if a single sheet of 8.5 x 11″ weighs .16 ounce. About 62 average harvest-ready pine trees worth of paper. And all of it needs to be organized, potentially in hours in the run-up to a legal event, to find specific information that will save someone’s tail.
At the other end of the scale, of course, our life science clients are now talking on the atomic and nanoparticle scale, the scale where the actual work of the cell gets done, but for some reason these 500,000,000 pages are sticking with me. As the refrain often goes in our world, “Thank God there’s software for that.”