The characters swim in data, and their relationships to it shape the arc of the plot, and thus, the fate of the United States.

FORBES: 'Homeland' and the Age of Information Overload

Teradata dominates the market for huge data warehouses, defined as those bigger than 1 terabyte, or 1 trillion bytes of data (that's how many characters you would find in 2 million books).

FORBES: The Resurrection of NCR

Is this story close enough to our own daily lives to go deeper, or does this batch of 140 characters just pass us by along with the other data of the moment?

FORBES: Whoops, I Just Checked In To A Firing Squad

So Fastcase and others are paying Indian data-entry firms 40 to 60 cents per 1, 000 characters to "triple-key" the books into digital form, with three typists entering the text and a computer picking the version at least two agree upon.

FORBES: Magazine Article