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The Weight of an e-Book

Posted by samzenpus on from the because-he-can dept.

whoever57 writes "According to Prof Kubiatowicz from Berkeley, each time an additional book is downloaded to an e-reader, the mass of the e-reader increases. The effect doesn't really make the devices more difficult to carry: the professor calculates that 4GB of books would increase its weight by a billionth of a billionth of a gram— about the mass of a single virus or DNA molecule."

1 of 243 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not true at all. by niftydude · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I think they're talking about flash memory, which does involve confining excess electrons in an isolated piece of material (the "floating gate") to produce zeros.

    Yes - but if the flash memory is formatted - it would be all zeros already.

    So if the book is downloaded - all the extra ones created should release the excess electrons, and actually make the book lighter!!!

    However - if the memory was quick formatted - unwritten memory would be randomly 1 or 0, and adding an ebook would typically keep the same average of 1s and 0s - meaning the reader would on average stay the same weight.

    --
    You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.