It still amazes me that a little piece of circuitry half an inch across can store hundreds of megabytes. But we're all getting used to such feats, especially as people add memory cards to their digital cameras to hold more photos. In my case, I carry a couple of hundred books -- including Webster's Third New International Dictionary -- around on an iPaq with 256 MB of added storage.

Now, that Webster's volume is one big book -- 476,000 vocabulary entries on 2,783 pages in the printed edition. In fact, as found in a bookstore, the dictionary weighs a whopping 12.5 pounds and is fully 4 inches thick. The beauty of carrying it in my pocket is that I can tap a word in a book I'm reading and get the full definition, which means I use the dictionary a lot more than I used to.

I'm told that terabyte-sized hard disks are coming; i.e., disks in the range of 1,000 gigabytes. Another way to look at a terabyte is like this: 50,000 trees made into paper and printed. Two terabytes are about the size of an academic research library, while ten terabytes is the size of all the U.S. Library of Congress' print collections.

I argue that massive storage capacities are good news for literacy. Imagine how many huge reference works sit untouched on shelves because they're simply too bulky to pick up and use on a regular basis. Many of those who bought the miniature-text version of the Oxford English Dictionary got over the euphoria when they realized how hefty the resulting two volumes were, and how tedious it was to work with the included magnifier to define a word.

But big storage isn't just handy -- it's becoming a necessity. The authors of a recent study on information carried on at the University of California at Berkeley discovered that 800 MB of data is produced yearly for every person on the planet. In 2002 alone, five exabytes, or more than five billion gigabytes, of new information was created by various industries and circulated in print, film, optical and magnetic media.

An exabyte makes a terabyte look tiny. Suppose you took that Library of Congress' print collection as a gauge. Five exabytes comes out to 500,000 Libraries of Congress. And we haven't even begun to scratch the surface. If we look beyond books and reports and magazine articles, we find the raw data carried by the Internet, and by the telephone system, not to mention radio and television.

Add all that up and you get 18 exabytes, 98 percent of which is carried in telephone calls, a worldwide, incessant chatter that dwarfs all other transmission of information. When it comes to the Web, the study finds 167 terabytes on the public Web; the "invisible Web," which includes all those sources not explicitly designed for open access, appears to be at least 400 times larger still.

What's clearly going to happen as we move up to terabyte-size hard disks is that devices like personal video recorders (think Tivo) will be able to store hundreds of movies and thousands of songs, while digital devices acting as media servers, distributing entertainment throughout the house, will become increasingly commonplace.

Business Week thinks that's a boost for home networking -- and it is -- but it's even more of a boost for mobile tools that can turn into reference libraries or work stations. These are heady days for those of us who want to untether from our desks, while taking everything we need for work with us. The big problem we'll be facing in a few years will not be how to store something, but deciding what to store. The computer that can make humanlike judgments on quality is some generations away.

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