You might have to use more than one printer to really get your money’s worth.

As most of you may be aware, Columbia has made the questionable decision to give almost every student a semester printing quota of $150, at ten cents per page. 1500 pages per semester. That’s a lot of pages. Here at Bwog, we’re very environmentally conscious, and would of course never endorse printing 1500 pages per semester, no matter whether Columbia gives it to you or not. But we did wonder what exactly all those pages could get you.

First, we’ll need to know how many words that is per page. As evidenced by this page of lorem ipsum text, one single-spaced page at normal font size is roughly 500 words. Thus, 1500 pages can hold about 1500 x 500 words—as we learned in second-grade math, the zeroes always carry over, making it (75 | 0000) words, or 750,000 words. So: what could you print with a 750,000 word limit?

Well, Brandon Sanderson writes a lot (full disclosure: the writer of this piece is from Utah and feels a certain home-state bias for Sanderson). His Mistborn series, for the first era and including short stories, clocks in at 748,621 words. Printing all of that would take just under 1500 pages, but you could do it. The series is probably more action-packed than whatever readings you have to print out for class, even if its relative literary merit can be debated.

Other things you could print out:

• Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, at 645,000 words (author’s note: don’t)
• War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy, at 600,000 words
• The entire Twilight saga, by Stephanie Meyer, at 587,246 words
• The Lord of the Rings series, by J.R.R. Tolkien, at 576,459 words
• Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo, at a [comparatively] measly 545,925 words

“But wait!” I hear the gentle readers cry. “You’ve forgotten the cardinal rule of printing: always print double-sided!” Double-sided pages, of course, double the number of pages you can effectively print, giving you 3000 pages to print to your heart’s content. Using our previous math, that works out to 1,500,000 words. With that many words, you could print:

• The Expanse series, by James S.A. Corey, at 1,334,000 words
• Mission Earth, by L. Ron Hubbard, at 1,200,000 words
• The Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling, at 1,084,170 words

A million words is a lot to read. And making the words smaller makes them harder to read. But if you really want to squeeze out every printed word Columbia can give you, then you can print four pages on a single page. So if you get 3000 pages at one page per page (1PPP), then you get 12,000 pages at four pages per page (4PPP). Six million words of content, available wherever you can find them. That’s bigger than most classic epic-fantasy series, like the Malazan series by Steven Erikson and Ian Esslemont, and enough to print even the longest singular novel, Venmurasu, which clocks in at only 3,680,000 words.

You could print the same thing multiple times. The Bee Movie script is only 68 pages in script format, so you could print it 175 times with room to spare. You could print a picture of every undergraduate student at Columbia twice over. You could print Shakespeare’s entire body of work (884,000 words) roughly seven times, though not all of them would be useful for that LitHum reading.

And finally, with all those pages, you might…

Just might…

Be able to print the entire length of one PrezBo email.

Images via Charlie Bonkowsky