On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 07:23:33PM -0800, Joseph McAllister scripsit: > BUT. Graydon, you didn't factor in the energy cost of making and > distributing the readers, let alone the non-sustainability of the > sources of the component parts, nor in some cases the inability to > recycle those parts.
Pretty much everything involved can be done from sustainable parts; one of the reasons so much money is getting dumped into the plastic-substrate and OLED display technologies is it gets away from the indium and gallium and on to the carbon and silicon. The other thing is that one reader can hold *many* books; a single 32 GB SDHC card is a good approximation of a personal library. The ~2 TB successor cards from 2021 or so will be able to do a good scientific library with illustrations. So you're putting the cost of 1 reader up against a couple hundred books, and even today the reader tends to win that as a resource question. If you have a network connected reader and do your ephemeral reading -- news, weather, stock prices... -- on it, rather than printed newspapers, it's an even larger win. [snip -- "useful functional knowledge resides in human social groupings" is perhaps too far off topic...] > Long Live Books. Longer than humanity will, most likely. But they don't. Really GOOD books, not just vellum but *fine* vellum, with fortunate long term storage, are good for about a millennium. Top grade linen rag paper has managed about 500 years so far. All of this assumes you get the ink just right, too. (There are interesting bits of parchment lace where the ink ate through from both sides...). Rare and very dry storage will get clay tablets and papyrus parchment through a couple-three millennia. But that's about it. The only really long term survival of human art we know about is cave painting, and the number of suitable caves is highly limited. -- Graydon, who learnt how to write with goose quills, once upon a time. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
