“How many books are in the library? The version that’s online now went up in May. There was about a month and a half where the first version was online — the first version was text on disk; it would just read from text files to retrieve pages from books. There were about a million books. Then I figured out an algorithm so you wouldn’t have to store any information on disk. It went from a million books to 10^5,000th books in about a month.”
“You’ve got one of every page possible, right, but not every book? A 410-page book would have 1,312,000 characters, and there are 29 characters in the character set [26 letters, the space, the period, and the comma], so there would be 29^1,312,000 power of unique books in that library. Right now the pages are organized into 410-page books, but not every 410-page book exists. Every individual page does exist somewhere in the library, somewhere in those 410-page books. It’s just a matter of the number of operations to construct one page of text. Basically there’s a series of conversion operations going on. You have to do those operations 3,200 times for one page of text, and to make an entire book you have to do them 1,312,000 times. So making a page takes less than a second. Generating an entire book takes about 4 to 6 seconds. It’s just a little bit too slow for the internet. It’s not impossible by any means, and I’m working on a downloadable version that will have every possible 410-page book in it. But I just thought that given the speed at which things move on the internet, it was ideal to restrain the contents of the library.”
“that type of referentiality — of recontextualization — is exactly what’s happening in the library. We can take text that we’re used to encountering in a certain context, attached to the intentions of a speaking subject, and we can find it in the library completely outside of that context. That’s exactly what’s happening.”
“How would you define your relationship with the library? I think I created another iteration of a very old idea. This had existed long ago in ancient Greece as a philosophical thought experiment, and has existed for at least a century in other variations as a literary idea, as a short story. And now it exists as a website or computer program, so I’ve added a link to a chain in that sense.”