printed materials by far take up more room than music.
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Summary
A decently large book needs a relatively small amount of information to store itself. With a little added formating, it is plain to see how a kindle book can be 800Kb. The book is simply raw text + formatting. Music takes a lot more information (data) to convey, therefore it takes up more storage space.
lengthy technical information follows
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Details
A 1000 word (approximately) MS Word file takes up about 200Kb. A fair amount of that size is taken up by formatting. This is shown by the same text weighing 6.2Kb when saved as a .txt file, which stores only the characters used, agnostic of formating.
Kindle Books are structurally delimited by commonly accepted paradigms: the chapter, the section, the volume, etc. Beyond this modest formatting, there is nothing but text (plus, maybe, a wee bit of file overhead). Essentially, a Kindle Book is really more like a .txt file than a .doc (MS Word) file.
Text is quite simple to express digitally. You have 26 letters in the alphabet, and 52 when you factor in lower case. Add in common punctuation, numerals, and styling characters (the carridge return, the tab, the line break), and you come to somewhere around 200 different individual “character codes” for expressing text digitally.
Then, you can compress text, with the understanding that 9 times out of ten a q will be followed by a u, and that there are common vowel combinations… (ea, ie, oa, etc). These can be expressed by a single code, shrinking the information needed to represent the same end result.
For instance. If e=“1”, and i=“2” than to express “ei”, I would have to write “12”. But given that ei is used commonly, I can say that “ei”=“3” thus shrinking the information I need to write ao. Compound this over all the uses of ao in a given text, and the savings add up. This, in effect, is why such long works can be so small. Written language is easily compressed.
Music, on the other hand, can include a multitude of sounds. Listen to any one of the songs in your library, and you will find at least 1000 different sounds produced. Every sound must be expressed as if it were a letter in the alphabet, with these “letters” being strung together to form the music. While some compression can take place, the vast majority of the sounds must remain uncompressed, less you lose the distinction among sounds. Hence, higher bitrate music (better quality) is less compressed, but at the cost of file size. Therefore, it takes far more information to put out music.
You will find that a song (in moderate compression) will be about 3–5Mb (1Mb=1000Kb). To test this, right click on a song and click “get info”.
To see text in action, look at this book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Copy all of the text from the 4 parts (about 128.5 thousand words) into notepad (or textedit, if you are on a mac). Save the file, and then look at the properties/info (pc/mac names) for the size. It should come out to somewhere around 700Kb.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a decently large book. With a little added formating, it is plain to see how a kindle book can be 800Kb. The book is simply raw text + formatting. Music takes a lot more information to convey, therefore it takes up more storage space.
So from a math perspective, your remaining storage capacity on your iPhone is 1 Gigabyte (you called it 1G; the common abbreviation, though, is 1Gb. FYI). Standard SI unit prefixes state that Kilo (as in Kb) is 1 thousand of the base unit, (think 1000 gram = kilogram; 1000 metre = kilometre), Mega(as in Mb) is 1 thousand Kilos, and Giga (as in Gb) is 1 thousand Megas. Using more-round numbers for file sizes, let the Kindle Book file size be 1 Mb. If 1 Gb is 1000 Mb, then your iPhone will hold 1000 (more) Kindle Books. With the rounding that I did before taken into account, you would have 200 Mb remaining in reality.
Of course, this assumes that all files will have such a mean size of 800Kb, your milage may vary. Long story short: Kindle books are really small, because text is really small.
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