Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe
I know you are well read on these things but are you really sure? I thought books was renewable and not at all environmentally expensive. How much energy to produce one book? My intuition think it is not huge.
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You're not taking into account two things:
First, we're not talking about "one book," we're talking about enough books to level forests, run through huge paper mills and printers, transported in thousands of trucks, stored in millions of cubic feet of storage space, etc--that adds up to an enormous environmental load. And what you call "renewable" is actually being landfilled or burned (or recycled, but likely only once), releasing more carbon into the atmosphere; it's not like you can throw a book to the ground and get a tree next year. It will contribute to global warming before it contributes to the environment in a positive way.
And the time it takes to grow an adult tree that completely replaces the cut tree in handling the same environmental load is usually decades, unlike the claims of the forest industry that "we plant one tree for every tree we fell, thereby replenishing the forest." In actuality, that forest won't be replenished at that rate, because each tree felled is an additional few decades in time to regrow it and fully recover the resource, and they are chopping trees down at a much faster rate than 1 every few decades.
Second, if the energy put into producing 1 printed book is X, the energy put into producing 1000 copies of a printed book is 1000X. If the energy put into producing an ebook is X, the energy put into producing 1000 ebooks is X+Y, Y being the amount of energy needed to create 1000 copies of a
digital file, which is less than X by orders of magnitude. So the cost of producing a single copy of an ebook is essentially a tiny fraction of X, meaning multitudes of ebooks can be produced for the cost of the one ebook, and much less than the cost of multitudes of printed books.
The economy of ebooks is clear, and so is its smaller environmental footprint. When you look at the overall picture, you realize you're looking at the difference between an anthill and the Empire State Building (the ebooks are the anthill). So, yeah, I'm sure.