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

The cards were pricey, though, because synthesizing DNA is still a fairly slow and costly process. Catalog claims its combinatorial approach is more efficient. Making identical copies of the same book also drove the price down.

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

Data stored in DNA is “read” with a sequencing machine, which determines the order of those As, Cs, Gs, and Ts. San Francisco–based sequencing company Plasmidsaurus was tapped to do this decoding, and the DNA sequence is available to customers that purchase the book.

“So often, biotechnology is hidden, kind of behind the curtains,” says Niko McCarty, founding editor of Asimov Press. He and editor-in-chief Xander Balwit conceived of the DNA book project because they “wanted people to feel biotechnology.” He says Asimov Press has sold nearly 500 preorders so far.

The ability to put a capsule full of DNA on a shelf or in a drawer and forget about it is a major part of its appeal as a storage medium. Turek says DNA could potentially replace sprawling, energy-guzzling data centers. Unlike storing data on servers, which requires constant energy use, DNA can sit on a shelf for years without needing energy until that data is retrieved. Of course, it means DNA isn’t the ideal medium for storing data that’s accessed often. But researchers imagine that it could be an ideal way to preserve large amounts of archival data.

“This is going to be a technology that really attacks the energy problem quite head on,” Turek says.