Quote:
Originally Posted by axel77
We are circling already. As I said before the calculation is wrong doing only marginal costs. You have to calculate what environment damage you do buy buying an eInk device every X years instead of just buying books.
The question is not, now that I have an eInk device, is it more environment friendly to buy the next book in electronic or in paper format. The question is: Is it more environment friendly to stick with pBooks or to go for eInk devices and eBooks. And this is a question I see as to be complicated enough to be valued in both ways, depending which bias you have, you will likely come out with different results.
True enough. Lets just say "in the future devices will be like this or that", are likely to raise at least my alertness, as how often in the past have we been wrong estimating how the future will look like?
|
My original post addressed this as well. The point was to provide a methodology for analysing this question. The forst step is to split it into two parts:
1) Marginal cost
2) Cost of supporting infrastructure
It is obvious that ebooks are the clear winners on 1). Now realize that two is roughly a constant (i.e. it changes very little with increasing number of (ep)books). 1) on the other hand is unbounded - the difference in cost keeps on growing the larger the number of (ep)books there are. Therefore in the long term 1) will always dominate 2) no matter how large 2) is.
Note that it is this argument that really makes technological progress worthwhile. The infrastructure costs for any new technology are always higher than for an older technology. It is the lower marginal cost (in other words the greater efficiency), over the long term, that makes the new technology worthwhile.