On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 7:07 AM, Martin Baldan <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > > - 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. > > Glad you asked! That was a pretty drastic simplification, and I'm conflating 'software' with 'hardware' too. Without wasting too much time, hopefully, here's what I had in mind. I live in a city with some amount of printing industry, still. In the past, much more. Anyway, small presses have been part of civic life for centuries now, and the old-fashioned presses didn't require much in the way of imports, paper mills aside. I used to live in a smaller town with a mid-sized paper mill, too. No idea if they're still in business, but I've made my own paper, and it's not that hard to do well in small batches. My point is just that print technology (specifically the letterpress) can be easily found in the real world which is local, nontoxic, and "sustainable" (in the sense of only needing routine maintenance to last indefinitely) in a way that I find hard to imagine of modern electronics, at least at this point in time. Have you looked into the environmental cost of manufacturing and disposing of all our fragile, toxic gadgets which last two years or less? It's horrifying. 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. > Well, I had my own book collection in mind, which is well under 100 volumes, almost all mathematics, and I expect will last me for a few more decades anyway. More ephemeral books I'm happy to get out of the libraries, or 'rent' from the local used bookstores. Quality before quantity is a major part of the POV I'm trying to get across. YMMV if you prefer lots of cheap, fast-decaying information, which I am fully aware is the trend these days. -- Max
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