As the rate in the creation of human data has greatly improved with the rise of AI, scientists are interested DNA as a way to store digital information. After all, DNA is nature’s way of storing data. It encodes the genetic information and determines the blueprint for every living thing on earth.

And DNA is at least 1,000 times more compact than a solid-state hard drive. To show how compact, the researchers used to be encodes all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets, 52 pages of Mozart’s musicand an episode of the Netflix movie “Biohackers” to a small amount of DNA.

But these are research projects or media stunts. DNA data storage isn’t exactly mainstream yet, but it’s getting close. Now you can buy what will be the first commercially available book written on DNA. now, Asimov Press Begins an anthology of biotechnology essays and science fiction stories encoded in DNA strands. For $60, you can get a physical copy of the book and the nucleic acid version—a metal capsule filled with dried DNA.

To encode the book in DNA, Asimov Press worked with the Boston-based company Catalog, which created approximately 500,000 unique DNA molecules to encode the book’s 240 pages, which representing 481,280 bytes of data.

Traditional DNA data storage works by converting the digital file’s binary code of 0s and 1s into As, Cs, Gs, and Ts—the building blocks of DNA. Custom DNA strands are chemically synthesized letter by letter to match the desired sequence.

Catalog instead uses a method called combinatorial assembly, which the company likens to the Gutenberg printing press. Similar to how moving letters can be arranged to form words, the Catalog creates an alphabet of pieces of DNA that can be assembled to represent pieces. The company produces snippets of DNA multiple times and then uses enzymes to encode information into them. David Turek, the Catalog’s chief technology officer, said it would cost little to encode a DNA book and make 1,000 copies.

“This is a case where you encode something in DNA once and you can make as many replicas as you want using the tools of molecular biology,” he said. “It’s easy to do it in quantity.”

In 2023, the French company Biomemory began to offer a $1,000 DNA storage card which allows customers to store almost one kilobyte of data, equivalent to a short email, of their choice. At the time, CEO Erfane Arwani told WIRED that the offer was an experiment to gauge consumer interest in DNA data storage. “We want to show that our process is ready to be shown to the world,” he said.

The cards are expensive, however, because synthesizing DNA is still a slow and expensive process. Catalog claims that its combination approach is more efficient. Making identical copies of the same book also keeps the price down.

After the Catalog did the encoding, the DNA molecules were dried into a powder and sent to France, where the biological storage firm Imagene packaged the molecules in stainless steel capsules with an inert internal atmosphere, meaning no oxygen or moisture inside. In this condition, the DNA inside can be preserved for thousands of years.