Some 62 billion e-mails are sent every day. That's billion with a B.

It's all part of a deluge of too many books, magazines and TV news crawls that is causing Americans to stop paying attention, according to a new book "Your Attention Please."

Say what? asap spoke with the authors — journalist Paul B. Brown and Alison Davis, CEO of Davis & Company, a communications consultancy — about life in the too-much-information age.

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You say in your book that an information glut is causing sensory overload, that people read a lot but retain very little. How did we get to this point?

Davis: The whole information age is only really about two decades old ... and it's a major reason we feel so overloaded. But there's proliferation of media, proliferation of messages. It's just way too easy to send an e-mail to way too many people, and we all suffer as the recipients of this.

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There has also been an explosion in other types of information, whether it's advertising or even the TV news "crawl" at the bottom of the screen. Why do TV news stations think we can process six pieces of information at once?

Davis: In my view it actually started with MTV, which debuted in early '80s (and) really picked up the pace of information. ... And then everybody sort of glommed onto this idea it should really fast moving. ...

In an interest to capture people's attention, what they've created is an information overload glut even when you're just watching a sporting event or just watching the news. It's an attempt to keep you watching, but I think what it does is it makes people kind of tune out a bit.

Brown: I have a 23-year-old son ... who will watch four football games simultaneously and each of the four games that he's watching they do all these information boxes, and he's now used to it. And so as result of this, you're not going to give 24-year-olds less information, you're going to give them more information, and it's going to get worse. ...

I can't do it. I cannot physically watch football with him. ... We will watch the same game on separate televisions for that very reason, because he has to keep flipping around, looking at scores, how is this affecting his fantasy football league, and I'm saying, can I just watch the Patriots please?

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Your book offers tips for communicators. Care to share some?

Davis: The No. 1 core of our advice is, the more your communication is aimed at meeting somebody else's needs, the person you're trying to reach -- the less it's about you and the more it's about them -- the more likely they're going to engage.

Brown: What follows from that is, shorter is better. You know the great Mark Twain line: If I had more time, I'd write you a shorter letter. (That's) absolutely right.

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BY THE NUMBERS

-- More than 18,000 magazines and 60,000 books are published every year in the United States.

-- The U.S. Postal Service delivers more than 200 billion pieces of mail a year.

-- An estimated 62 billion e-mails are sent every day, with e-mail generating about 400,000 "terabytes" of new information every year. (One terabyte equals one trillion bytes.) By comparison, a typical academic research library contains about 2 terabytes of information.

-- The Internet contains about 170 terabytes of information, which is 17 times more than the Library of Congress print collections.

-- About 5 billion instant messages are sent every day.

-- The average office printer consumes 24 reams of paper a year.

(Data compiled by Brown and Davis from academia, publishers and other sources. The e-mail and Internet figures are from a study by the University of California at Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems.)

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Stephanie Hoo is asap's business writer.

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