Booking Form - Winter: Fill & Download for Free

IcelandMore books are written, published and sold per person per year in Iceland than anywhere else on the planet. One in ten Icelanders will become a published author in their lifetime.Now, isn't that something.But why is it so? For starters, long, dark winter nights, a geographical expansiveness that makes trips to, say, the cinema more difficult, a great selection of well-stocked bookshops and a small population are handy for generating the above mentioned ranks and figures. It seems that Icelanders love books, and the tiny population's passion for books is the closest thing to a universal religion in the nation. Indeed, the annual Christmas book frenzy has to be seen to be believed. In every crisis, economic collapse or volcanic eruption, the Icelander's first instinct is to hash the matter out in book form, trusting long form text over television or film. Icelanders aren't generally intimidated by books: the Report of the Special Investigation Commission, a 2,000-plus page official document outlining the causes of the 2008 economic crisis was one of 2010's bestselling books, despite being available for free online.Cultural factors are at play here. Unlike British/American societies, which are profoundly and deeply anti-intellectual, erudition isn't considered a sign of elitism and snobbery in Iceland, but instead of education and intelligence.In fact, Iceland is probably the only country where books get a primetime TV show, “Kiljan”, while movies and cinema get relegated to a radio show aired at odd hours.P.S - I m not from Iceland but read this somewhere on Quora. Felt it qualified for this question. Thanks User-12583583348628527350 for the answer.

“Say, [O Muhammad], "O mankind, indeed I am the Messenger of Allah to you all, [from Him] to whom belongs the dominion of the heavens and the earth. There is no deity except Him; He gives life and causes death." So believe in Allah and His Messenger, the unlettered prophet, who believes in Allah and His words, and follow him that you may be guided.” - (The Holy Qur’an 7:158)Fig: Location of the initial revelation (Cave Hira, Mountain of Light)Every single words of the Holy Qur’an is from Almighty Allah and not prophet’s own words. Prophet himself could not read or write.“Your companion [Muhammad] has not strayed, nor has he erred, Nor does he speak from [his own] inclination. It is not but a revelation revealed,” (The Holy Qur’an 53: 2–4)The lexical meaning of ‘Revelation’ (‘Waahi’ in Arabic) is “secretly informing someone about something”. Other meanings are hints, inspiration, secret words, implication and signs. In the Islamic terminology, revelation is secret messages from Allah that are descended on prophets.Now they could be descended in 3 ways:1) Directly hearing from Allah (very few occasions) just like it happened with prophet Moses (PBUH).“And Messengers We have mentioned to you before, and Messengers We have not mentioned to you, and to Moses Allah spoke directly.” (The Holy Qur’an 4:164)2) An angel brings it (most common method), mainly angel Gabriel brings the messages from Allah to prophets. Sometimes Gabriel appeared in true form and sometimes appeared in human shape.3) Directly sending to the hearts of prophets without involving angel Gabriel.Messages and instructions which directly came to species or animals (other than prophets) are called ‘Ilham’. An example is:“And your Lord inspired to the bee, "Take for yourself among the mountains, houses, and among the trees and [in] that which they construct.” - (The Holy Qur’an 16:68)Waahi came to Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) in many different ways:a) Sound like a ringing bell: Sometimes Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) used to listen a bell sound in his ear, after the dissipation of the ringing, revelation was automatically memorized. This was a painful process as prophet used to sweat even in winter nights.b) In prophetic dreams: prophetic dreams (Good ones) are from Allah. In the beginning, prophet received some revelations in this way.c) Directly in heart: these revelations came without the angel medium or Gabriel.d) Angel appeared in human shape: Gabriel sometimes came to prophet with messages in a human shape.e) Angel appeared in true form: In the beginning, Gabriel came to prophet in true form with all wings. Prophet also saw Gabriel in this form during his night journey (Sidratul Muntaha-Lote tree which is situated near heaven).“And he certainly saw him in another descent At the Lote Tree of the Utmost Boundary” (The Holy Qur’an 53: 13–14)“One of soundness. And he rose to [his] true form” (The Holy Qur’an 53: 6)f) Revelation came from behind Allah’s veil: this happened during the night journey.And it is not for any human being that Allah should speak to him except by revelation or from behind a partition or that He sends a messenger to reveal, by His permission, what He wills. Indeed, He is Most High and Wise. (The Holy Qur’an 42:51)g) Angel Raphael (Israfeel): In three years no revelation came through Gabriel to prophet, during this time angel Israfeel brought messages and instructions.Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) was born as a Hanif, that means he was a believer and rejected false gods and idols (created by humans as well as worshipped). He was certain that there was a God who made everything around him and supplies daily provisions. Just like Prophet Abraham (PBUH), he questioned about his surroundings. He meditated for years quietly (Hira cave), during this time his wife Khadija cooked food for him and sent him food there. Sometimes prophet brought food for few days with him. During such a time one day angel Gabriel appeared with the first 5 verses of Surah Alaq (chapter 96). At that time he used to memorize the revealed verses instantly as his memory was very strong.Although, most Arab people of that time were strong in memorizing things because of the less availability of paper. They had to run day to day business calculations so it was not possible to do if they did not have a powerful memory. Prophet Muhammad himself managed his wife’s business for some time.Initially (610 AD), he used to recite them repeatedly for retaining it in his memory. Also Allah helped him memorize as prophet was in constant fear due to such sudden development of events.“Move not your tongue with it, [O Muhammad], to hasten with recitation of the Qur'an. Indeed, upon Us is its collection [in your heart] and [to make possible] its recitation. So when We have recited it [through Gabriel], then follow its recitation.” (The Holy Qur’an 75: 16–18)Now whenever a verse was revealed to prophet Muhammad (PBUH), he called upon his companions to memorize that including himself. They repeatedly did that during prayer sessions. Later preservation happened through written medium as many companions died during battles with militant pagans and disbelievers.Very few were literate at that time. The companions who were given responsibility of writing them down were called ‘scribes of waahi’ (katiban-e-waahi). There were 42 of such people. Most prominent was Hazrat Zaid ibn Sabit. Thus The Holy Qur’an was preserved entirely in both oral and written form during prophet’s life time.Fig: Birmingham Qur’an manuscript (Earliest Quranic manuscript consists of two leaves of parchment that are a fragment of an early Quranic manuscript dated between 610 AD – 645 AD)But it was not collected together in a book form during prophet’s lifetime, rather the fragments were written down under the supervision and preserved under the custody of several companions. After Hazrat Abu bakar (1st Caliph of Islam), Al Qur’an was compiled in book form under the direct supervision of Hazrat Usman (3rd Caliph of Islam).

Great Question... My answer: 226,532 years at the speed of 250 words per minute. You can see my detailed break down below.Couple of assumptions (and/or ground rules) for my answer:Am going to assume that when we cite view/read all the content on the Internet, this is content to which any regular user would have access to. So your Facebook feeds and the feed of the other nearly 1 Billion people is off limits to me and hence by answer.No Audio/Video content is included.No emails are included (because as a regular user) I would not have access to someone else's emails.No information that is normally not shared with me. So for example if there are Terrabytes and Terrabytes of data in Dropbox (product) or Amazon S3 Storage, I, as regular user would not have access to it.Mathematical and/or Numerical Data is excluded. This is because reading mathematical and or numerical data, there is no concrete way to define words per minute, etc.Any foreign language is excluded. The Questioner as already cited that.Any information that is embedded into the deep internet / web that I, as a regular user cannot regularly access is not included.Any subscription based information (am assuming I do not want to spend money in getting access to data)Visual (art, images, graphics) are all excluded.Scientific journals, etc. would be included. Since this is easily accessible data.Only Web data is considered here.and perhaps the most important assumption of all, that we assume that when the person starts reading, all data upload/addition to the Internet is frozen.So with that said, the next question is, how big is that much data? It seems, for an average joe, that is no ordinary question. Its all a matter of what source you consider...So let me present some data sources which attempt to show how much data there is on the Internet.The Internet Minute...Source: Infographic visualizes the Web's massive, constant flow of dataFrom the above, what is applicable to this question is...Number of TweetsTumblr postsThe number of Websites createdNumber of Blog PostsWill get back to this later, here are some more information sources:Pingdom published some awesome results on the Internet Stats, which can be seen here: Internet 2012 in numbersApplicable from this list are:634 Million Websites (as of December 2012)87.8 Million Number of Tumblr (website) blogs59.4 Million Wordpress Blogs246 million number of Domain Names163 Billion number of Tweets (as of July 2012) since Twitter (product) started200+ million number of members on LinkedIn (product) (as announced by LinkedIn on their website: Source: LinkedIn reaches 200 million members worldwideTumblr (website) itself publishes its statistics which can be seen at: About | Tumblr - and the number of 10th March 2013 is:According to The size of the World Wide Web (The Internet) - here is what the Indexed version of the Internet looks like (as measured by Google (company))Which as on 10th March 2013, is just shy of 45 Billion Web Pages (we'll round that up to 45 Billion).Bing's compilation of the World Wide Web Index is as follows:Which is just about 12 Billion Web PagesOn a tangent note, if you are wondering why the traffic dipped on 2nd Feb, it was because of the US Winter Storm (31st Jan-2nd Feb), presumably there was outage in the measuring server and thus the results of zero show up.Now if you consider the number of Books that are available on the Internet to read, to a common person, there are literally Millions. Project Gutenberg being one of the most important contributors. However, Project Gutenberg is only about 42, 000 books, the Open Library which has more than 1+ Million books to access for free (See Welcome to Open Library (Open Library))Lets not forget, Wikipedia...Here are some statistics from the Active Counters:Source: Wikipedia:StatisticsTo put it in another perspective, this is how it would stack up:The following tries to illustrate how big the English-language Wikipedia might be if printed and bound in book form. Each volume is assumed to be 25 cm tall, 5 cm thick, and containing 1,600,000 words or 8,000,000 characters. The size of this illustration is based upon the live article count.Source: Wikipedia:Size of WikipediaSo, time to do some classifications and number crunching:The areas we will measure are as follows:Web SitesWeb PagesTweetsWordPress BlogsTumblr PostsWikipedia PagesLinkedIn PagesBooksand the ever important Miscellaneous (other) which we will assume ot be 10% of the Google Index (i.e. at 4,500,000 pages).My assumptions are shown in the calculations below:Content Size:The following content sources were considered with their size:Calculation for Books:Calculation for LinkedIn Pages:Calculation for Wikipedia Pages:Calculation for Tumblr Posts:Calculations for WordPress Blogs:Calculation for Tweets (Twitter):Calculation for Google's Index:Calculation for Websites:Calculation for Misc/Other Content on the Internet:...and the grand total comes out to be like this:Total Number of Years Required to Read all the Content on the Internet:*Image credit: How-To: 7 Tactics for Getting Online Readers to Stick