Thanks, interesting link. But I have some questions and comments: _ How much does an e-reader last?
The article says: "This means an iPad owner would need to offset 32.4 printed books during the iPad’s lifetime to break even in terms of the carbon footprint of reading those books." But as far as I know, it doesn't say what the iPad's lifetime is, so I don't know how many books per year that means. By the way, an iPad is not more of an ebook reader than a desktop is. I would say that only e-ink devices (or something just as good in terms of visual comfort) deserve to be called e-book readers. _ Hey, we forgot about newspapers and magazines! : "If you are also offsetting printed magazines and printed newspapers with the iPad then the number of books you would need to offset to break even could be much lower." _ Now this is cheating: "If a person would normally share a printed book with others, buy some used printed books, or borrow many of the printed books from the library then the numbers would need to be adjusted to account for that." That's a bit like saying that physical exercise makes you fat, because you get hungry and you eat more. Even if people ended up wasting more because they read *a lot* more, that wouldn't affect the economic and ecologic impact per book, which was the issue at hand. For my part, I don't even conceive of e-readers as a replacement for paper books. In my case, they are a replacement for laptops and desktop when it comes to reading long texts. I don't buy paper books any more, because I don't have any spare room for them. _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
