> > - Print technology is orders of magnitude more environmentally benign > and affordable. >
That seems a pretty strong claim. How do you back it up? Low cost and environmental impact are supposed to be some of the strong points of ebooks. You can publish an e-book virtually for free and reach millions of readers. In dead tree form, it may cost you at millions of dollars (depending on the printing technology, but in any case quite a lot of money). Then if you want to correct a mistake, you can't just fix it, you have to issue a new edition, kill more trees and spend all that money again. Then there's the issue of ink, which must also be manufactured, Also, you have to spend oil in the form of fuel for the trucks that will deliver those books. And they have to be somehow stored until someone buys them. Now there is on-demand printing, but it's still less scalable than batch printing, and there's still the issue of storing the paper for the books. The whole process consumes a lot of energy and releases toxic chemicals, and ultimately produces waste in the form of old paper. Not to speak of the space they take up in your home, which may lead you to spend thousands of dollars in a bigger home, which otherwise you wouldn't need. Yes, e-book readers also have to be manufactured, and unlike paper books, they consume some energy in their normal use, but once everyone has an ebook reader, the environmental impact and the cost of each new ebook are negligible in comparison. No manufacturing, no transport, no storage space, no waste disposal. Only a few seconds of internet connection to download it, and then a few hours of very low energy consumption to read it. Then you can turn off your reader until the next ebook comes out. I can only conceive of paper books having a lower TCO than ebooks if people usually spent all day reading the same book again and again for several years. _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
