People are praising e-book readers as a green alternative to books. I'm not so sure.
E-book readers are full of electronics. These require large expensive factories, which use a lot of resources. Then the devices are shipped, consuming resources - such hi-tech manufacture is expensive, therefore is done somewhere cheap, meaning international shipping. Books are cheap to print.
Then you need a computer with Internet access to get your ebooks - more hi-tech, more distant manufacturing and transport. It downloads books from big websites, meaning big datacentres, meaning lots and lots of manufacturing and power.
Then the devices need regular charging - so more power, more fuels being burned, more power distribution.
Books tend to last. They're cheap, need no power, have no DRM (photocopy 'em or scan 'em if you want - it's laborious but perfectly doable), can be reused many times by many people, can be lent and borrowed (think libraries), etc.
So, yes, ebooks are a great and very handy thing, but beware labelling them as very green.
OTOH, the newspaper and magazine industries consume vast quantities of wood for a product sold in huge numbers which lasts a single day, perhaps a week or at best a month, is frequently used by one person and then thrown away.
That industry is far more environmentally-damaging. Books last for a long time. They're made from trees. Trees make themselves, as if by magic, from atmospheric carbon dioxide. Trees are actual functioning self-replicating nanotech. Make a tree into a pile of books that will be kept for years and that CO₂ stays locked up.
As such, books ain't so bad.
But if tablets replace newspapers with e-book documents, I won't mind too much.
I have an old dead basic Sony e-reader. Its sync software only works on Windows. But now I have an SD card (512MB, i.e., huge) and a memory stick pro (32MB, i.e., still enough for dozens of PDFs) so I just copy files onto them. Much easier.
It also displays photos (not too badly), acts as a notepad with a stylus (odd, clever but not very useful)... and plays MP3s, which is odd. I mean, I'm sure the functionality was really cheap to add, but as an ereader, its CPU only wakes occasionally when you turn the page. That means it needs only a tiny battery. But music playback means continuous operation and thus nukes the battery. Not a sensible addition. Text-to-speech for ebooks for visually-impaired people is fine, but phones and MP3 players can do that. No need for it on a tablet or ereader, really.
Sure, I wish I had a Kindle with wireless synching but they're too expensive for me still - and also limited. I also won't pay for a tablet. I want something that's both a tablet (arbitrary content, programs, web access etc.) *and* an ereader (thin, light, runs for days to weeks on a charge, like my 1990s PDAs did.)
You know the big difference between a 1990s PDA and a tablet? Apart from the fact that my PDAs had really good keyboards?
The screen. 1990s meant mono screens. Mono screens use very little power. Colour screens use loads.
While we're waiting for colour e-ink displays, I'd like an Android tablet with a mono LCD screen, please. A big one, iPad sized not Kindle sized. Narrow - 16:9 or something - would be fine.
Big tablets are nice gadgets, but expensive, heavy, and as they're rather fragile do not handle being dropped well.
The Mac Portable in 1989 or so had a wonderful mono active-matrix LCD - pin-sharp, daylight-readable without a backlight, or bright and readable indoors in low-light conditions with a backlight. http://lowendmac.com/pb/macintosh-portable.html
That was the NINETEEN-EIGHTIES, FFS. It should not be beyond the wit of man to make one now, 25Y later. So I can have something that weighs a couple of hundred ounces but lasts for 3-4 days, so I can use it every day and only charge it twice a week. It would even be able to play video, just in black and white. And it'd be cheap.
The Apple display was monochrome. Now we should be able to do 256-level greyscale no problem at all. That looks pretty good in black and white.
While we're waiting for the fancy colour displays, this seems like an obvious move to me. I don't know if anyone is still manufacturing large mono LCD displays - perhaps for some kind of machine controls or something - but if not, making 'em on a colour LCD line wouldn't be impossible, I think.
Then you need a computer with Internet access to get your ebooks - more hi-tech, more distant manufacturing and transport. It downloads books from big websites, meaning big datacentres, meaning lots and lots of manufacturing and power.
Then the devices need regular charging - so more power, more fuels being burned, more power distribution.
Books tend to last. They're cheap, need no power, have no DRM (photocopy 'em or scan 'em if you want - it's laborious but perfectly doable), can be reused many times by many people, can be lent and borrowed (think libraries), etc.
So, yes, ebooks are a great and very handy thing, but beware labelling them as very green.
OTOH, the newspaper and magazine industries consume vast quantities of wood for a product sold in huge numbers which lasts a single day, perhaps a week or at best a month, is frequently used by one person and then thrown away.
That industry is far more environmentally-damaging. Books last for a long time. They're made from trees. Trees make themselves, as if by magic, from atmospheric carbon dioxide. Trees are actual functioning self-replicating nanotech. Make a tree into a pile of books that will be kept for years and that CO₂ stays locked up.
As such, books ain't so bad.
But if tablets replace newspapers with e-book documents, I won't mind too much.
I have an old dead basic Sony e-reader. Its sync software only works on Windows. But now I have an SD card (512MB, i.e., huge) and a memory stick pro (32MB, i.e., still enough for dozens of PDFs) so I just copy files onto them. Much easier.
It also displays photos (not too badly), acts as a notepad with a stylus (odd, clever but not very useful)... and plays MP3s, which is odd. I mean, I'm sure the functionality was really cheap to add, but as an ereader, its CPU only wakes occasionally when you turn the page. That means it needs only a tiny battery. But music playback means continuous operation and thus nukes the battery. Not a sensible addition. Text-to-speech for ebooks for visually-impaired people is fine, but phones and MP3 players can do that. No need for it on a tablet or ereader, really.
Sure, I wish I had a Kindle with wireless synching but they're too expensive for me still - and also limited. I also won't pay for a tablet. I want something that's both a tablet (arbitrary content, programs, web access etc.) *and* an ereader (thin, light, runs for days to weeks on a charge, like my 1990s PDAs did.)
You know the big difference between a 1990s PDA and a tablet? Apart from the fact that my PDAs had really good keyboards?
The screen. 1990s meant mono screens. Mono screens use very little power. Colour screens use loads.
While we're waiting for colour e-ink displays, I'd like an Android tablet with a mono LCD screen, please. A big one, iPad sized not Kindle sized. Narrow - 16:9 or something - would be fine.
Big tablets are nice gadgets, but expensive, heavy, and as they're rather fragile do not handle being dropped well.
The Mac Portable in 1989 or so had a wonderful mono active-matrix LCD - pin-sharp, daylight-readable without a backlight, or bright and readable indoors in low-light conditions with a backlight. http://lowendmac.com/pb/macintosh-portable.html
That was the NINETEEN-EIGHTIES, FFS. It should not be beyond the wit of man to make one now, 25Y later. So I can have something that weighs a couple of hundred ounces but lasts for 3-4 days, so I can use it every day and only charge it twice a week. It would even be able to play video, just in black and white. And it'd be cheap.
The Apple display was monochrome. Now we should be able to do 256-level greyscale no problem at all. That looks pretty good in black and white.
While we're waiting for the fancy colour displays, this seems like an obvious move to me. I don't know if anyone is still manufacturing large mono LCD displays - perhaps for some kind of machine controls or something - but if not, making 'em on a colour LCD line wouldn't be impossible, I think.