Don't confuse the number of alternatives or items with the number of bits. That corresponds to about 3 bits.
Information is also related to variance.
The less a signal varies, the less information it can encode. Here is the difference. There are 26 letters in all, but to make the bits come out even, let's pretend there are 32 letters. That's 2 bits, and we already know that for 8 it's 3 more bits. For 26 letters let's say it's 4.5 bits.