Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Most facts aren't online
Most people feel that about 90 percent of information is online. Christopher Nolan suspected the real answer was closer to 0.9 percent, and the experiment was his way of testing it.
The author of The Nolan Variations ran it. He pulled ten facts from library books and went looking for them online, and he found only one of the ten. The result was nowhere near 0.9 percent, and nowhere near 90 percent either.
Nolan thinks technology has duped people into believing that all human knowledge is online.
Why aren't most books online?
Putting a book online means scanning every page and correcting the text, which takes money and labor. Copyright law also restricts posting the full text of books still under protection, which covers most 20th-century works. Google estimated in 2010 that roughly 129 million distinct books had been published in history. Only a fraction of those exist in searchable digital form.
Why does the web favor recent material?
The web only began carrying large amounts of content in the 1990s, so most of what it holds was written after that. Older material appears online only when someone chooses to scan, retype, or upload it. Anything printed before the web existed depends on that kind of effort. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has been saving copies of web pages since 1996.
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