Quote:
Originally Posted by davidspitzer
but doesn't evolution require change? - many people refused to give up their typewriters when word processors and eventually computers displaced them. It does not mean typewriters were bad or computers were good, its just a new way of doing things. I think most would agree though, except for nostalgic reasons, they would never use a typewriter now instead of computer?
You may not pay for textbooks and paper to print them up, but the forests do and the landfills do. I would not consider myself a treehugger in the classical sense, but iv'e had a realization of late that we have the means to curtail our paper addition, but we simply choose not to becuase it requires a little extra effort on our parts.
The human race show no signs of slowing down in it's population expansion and at the same time we increase our individual gross consumption.
I know its hard; we think that whatever one person does could not possibly make a difference,but if everyone takes the same stance then we are guaranteed not to make a difference. Change is hard, there is no doubt, but if we are all willing to just read that one paper, that one report, that one email, or that one book online instead of printing it, soon we will look back in amazement about how we used to cut down millions of trees a year and lug around reams of paper just to get our daily fix of information
|
I'm all for change--if it makes my life/work easier. If it doesn't, then I won't change. People happily moved from type writers to Word Processors as they were much easier to use, easier to edit, cut and paste stuff etc. etc.
For the environmental angle, I just don't care enough. I already try to conserve and I'm very good about recycling everything I can, so I'm not going to lose sleep over paper books, printing out PDFs etc. I keep most of them indefinitely after I mark them up, the ones I don't I'll give away (books) or recycle (printed PDFs). Add in that trees are a renewable resource and I'm just not that concerned.
So it will take e-versions that work as well or better for what I need to do in my work. Working in academia means being constantly busy and I'm not going to embrace any adaptations that make things clunkier and slower.
If I can mark them up just as easily as I can a paper book or article, flip through them quickly etc. then I'll give it a shot.
I have embraced the web and e-books for all my disposable reading--novels, magazines, newspapers etc. No need to waste paper on something I don't need to mark up and will never touch again.
Scholarly works related to my research I need to be able to mark up and keep on the bookshelf or in the file cabinet (printed journal articles) for easy access to marked passages, notes etc. throw the years as I do more research related to those topics etc.