Bananas for Scale
The Bible (Standard Print Edition)

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

The Bible (Standard Print Edition)

The most printed book in history, 5 billion copies and counting/Literature & Writing

A standard print Bible contains 66 books (Protestant canon), roughly 783,137 words in English, and typically weighs about 600 grams for a standard hardcover edition. The text runs to about 1,200 pages at roughly 35 millimeters thick. In digital form, the complete text occupies approximately 4.4 megabytes. An estimated 5 billion copies have been printed since Gutenberg's first edition in 1455, making it by far the most widely distributed book in human history. If stacked, those 5 billion copies would reach to the Moon and back about 22 times.

Measurements

Mass (standard hardcover)6 tenths kg
600 quadrillionVirus weights
50,000Housefly weights
1.7 tenthsNewborn babies
Digital text size4.4 million B
2.2 hundredthsSpotify playlists
8,800Phone contacts
3.06Floppy disks

About 4.4 MB

Thickness3.5 hundredths m
3.5Thumb tack lengths
1.2 thousandthsWater polo pools
2.19Dice edges
Pages (typical)1,200 units
32.3 trillionthsCells in a human body
600Pairs of socks
22.2African countries
Books in canon66 units
6.6 hundredthsMillennia
2.54Alphabets
1.03Chess boards

Protestant canon

Height2.3 tenths m
11.1 billionthsGreat Walls of China
235 millionCaffeine molecules
1.1 tenthsShaquille O'Neals

Standard hardcover

Browse more in Literature & Writing