The market for E-Book seems to be growing.
There are many E Readers in the market now.
Kindle, Sony E Reader, Ipad and many more.
Practicality aside, my concern is more on earth friendliness.
I thought conventional books will be more earth friendly compare to E-Book Reader.
But it was not.
Extract from Robert Nagle Article
http://www.teleread.org/2009/07/09/apple-amazon-rated-at-bottom-of-climate-change-scorecard-and-what-about-ebooks/
- Dead-tree books require cutting down trees. (Duh!). Dan Shapley writes, "The paper industry is the 4th largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions among United States manufacturing industries, and contributes 9% of the manufacturing sector’s carbon emissions." Allen Hershkowitz from the National Resource Defense Council agrees, saying, “The paper industry is the No. 1 industrial pressure on forests."
- Umbra Fisk summarizes the research so far into books vs. ebooks:
A MS candidate named Greg Kozak pitted textbooks against e-book devices [PDF] in 2003. He found that paper production, electricity of printing operations, and personal transportation were the main factors affecting the book footprint, while electricity was the main issue for e-readers; and that books were responsible for four times the greenhouse emissions as e-readers. In ‘04, two UC-Berkeley students evaluated newspaper vs PDA-based e-newspapers [PDF], and decided that a newspaper released 32-140 times the amount of CO2, and used 26-185 times the amount of water. A 2007 study in Sweden (here is the abstract) also looked at newspaper and found that newspaper’s biggest impact was in the paper production, while energy was the big impact for reading on the internet; for e-devices (the Kindle, etc.), production of the e-object is the biggest impact. The study concluded that reading e-newspapers had less impact than an actual newspaper.
- The current book ordering system encourages bookstores to order more books than they can reasonably sell. That increases the number of published copies and consequently the number of returns (and the amount of shipping costs).
- A number of print books which are bought are not read. In other words, books are produced with the goal to be sold, regardless of whether it is actually read. One cannot blame the publishing industry if people fail to read the books they buy; but with digital books, energy or resources are being consumed only if the ebook is actually being read.
- E-ink readers are the ultimate low-energy devices. Charges last for weeks or sometimes longer than a month. The only additional step they can take is to make the devices run by solar energy (sigh!).
I will not, i still prefer the good old way, a book in bag, anywhere i go, with a bookmark to mark my page, no batteries needed and can loan it to anyone once i finished it.
I will instead patronize 2nd hand bookshop to help save the earth.
