are ebooks better for the environment?
Posted on Thursday, September 2nd, 2010 by Ian Tuttle
Interesting article on Slate about the environmental impact of paper books vs ebooks. The author, Brian Palmer, suggests we “think of an e-reader as the cloth diaper of books.” “The iPad pays for its CO2 emissions about one third-of the way through your 18th book.” (It takes 23 books to pay off the carbon footprint of a Kindle).
This is all fine and good, but he then urges us to “Buy your books online. Brick-and-morter bookstores are horribly inefficient.” Easy there, Brian. I like my local bookstores, and I’ll keep shopping at them since they do good things like support local authors, recommend books I’d never have heard of otherwise, and say hello when I walk inside. By the way, when was the last time you went to a real live author event at Amazon.com?
2 Comments » | Posted in The Publishing Frontier | 
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These are interesting points to bring up, yet it is my opinion few will actually opt to buy and use a reader solely to save the environment. It could be a slight motivator or even a rationalization to buy one. Who knows? One thing I do know is that the picture of the tree and the reader is really creepy.
Yeah, that picture gets me too! I couldn’t help but wonder if the article was written by a lobbyist… definitely a sense of underlying agenda.
I do think there’s a strong argument for e-readers replacing subscription newspapers. Think of all that paper! Tossed out every day! It’s not like you keep the NYT back-issues on a shelf in your living room.