Here's a study which is a little more careful. Basically, it comes down to how many e-books your expect to read over the life of your device. Baseline for an iPad (considering only carbon emissions from manufacturing) is about 100 books.
http://www.greenpressinitiative.org/documents/ebooks.pdf -- Max On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 11:34 AM, Max Orhai <[email protected]> wrote: > > > 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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