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| Hearsay: |
The verdict is in: e-readers will fuck up your children’s future less than a paper book. First compelling reason I’ve seen to get one.
Think of an e-reader as the cloth diaper of books. Sure, producing one Kindle is tougher on the environment than printing a single paperback copy of “Pride and Prejudice.” But every time you download and read an electronic book, rather than purchasing a new pile of paper, you’re paying back a little bit of the carbon dioxide and water deficit from the Kindle production process. The actual operation of an e-reader represents a small percentage of its total environmental impact, so if you run your device into the ground, you’ll end up paying back that debt many times over. (Unless, of course, reading “Pride and Prejudice” over and over again is enough for you. Then, by all means, buy it in print and enjoy.)
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August 24th, 2010 at 10:40 am
Interesting, but no mention of used book stores or buying used books, which seems to be a reusable source.
August 24th, 2010 at 5:10 pm
Also no mention of the fact that forests are renewable, while the plastics and metals and other chemicals used to manufacture e-readers are not, and are not even necessarily recyclable in all areas.
“Those analyses do not indicate how much additional carbon is generated per book read (as a result of the energy required to host the e-bookstore’s servers and power the screen while you read), but they do include the full cost of manufacture, which likely accounts for the lion’s share of emissions.”
Uh, no. Middling sized data centres (Amazon and Apple both have several *big ones*) draw about the same amount of power, usually from coal-fired plants, as would be required to service 40,000 homes. They are responsible for roughly 2% of global carbon emissions, 1.5% of US power consumption, and their emission levels are expected to double by 2020, with the cost of powering them to become greater than the cost of building them by 2012 (which is a lot, given that they can cost more than half a billion dollars to build).
August 24th, 2010 at 8:23 pm
I’ve heard that said about computers, but computers create many times their weight in toxic garbage. and that isn’t a one time things as they are replaced every couple of years.
August 25th, 2010 at 6:46 am
I have books on my shelf from twenty and thirty years ago. Still doing stirling service and available for anyone to read not just me.
How many Kindle’s will still be working in even 3 or five years?
I’m not against ereaders as such, but marketing them as an environmental solution seems just plain wrong to me.