Is there too much information to digest?

If you’ve felt bombarded by information in this era of Internet communications, hundreds of TV channels and video games, it’s not your imagination.

A new study released Wednesday says households in the United States consumed a mind-boggling total of 3.6 zettabytes of information and 10,845 trillion words in 2008.

Put another way, it’s the equivalent of covering the continental United States and Alaska in a 7-foot-high stack of Dan Brown novels.

“We’re all on information overload for good reason,” said Roger Bohn, the study’s lead author and a professor of management at University of California-San Diego.

“The amount we can assimilate is only a little bit more than what our ancestors could assimilate, but the amount that’s available to us now is many orders of magnitude more,” said Bohn, director of the school’s Global Information Industry Center.

The researchers sought to create a census of how much data and information flows to consumers from all sources — the Internet, television, radio, newspapers, magazines, mobile phones, video games, DVD players, music files and more.

The study accounts for everything from individual bytes of words to the gigabytes of information in a video. But the report doesn’t cover data Americans get at work. That will be left for a future study.

One zettabyte is equal to 1 billion terabytes, or 1 million million gigabytes. The 3.6 zettabytes consumed is about 20 times more data than all the existing computer hard drives in the world can store.

Using 20 different sources of data — such as Nielsen television ratings and U.S. census data — the researchers created mathematical formulas to compute how information was consumed in words, bytes and time spent.

The report built on previous research at University of California-Berkeley and by International Data Corp. Previous projections found the world would not reach one zettabyte of data consumption until 2010, but Bohn said they didn’t fully account for television and video games use.

The UC San Diego researchers said the bulk of the bytes consumed came from three sources — nearly 54.6 percent from computer games, 34.7 percent through television and 9.8 percent from movies.