Kindle vs. Paper Books
So what is worse for the environment? Amazon.com’s Kindle e-book reader, which ends up creating e-waste when all is said and done? Or paper books, which obviously use up a heck of a lot of paper?
I’m not entirely certain an electronic book reader is all that much better than paper books environmentally speaking. I’m sure the statistics on book-making are staggering when it comes to trees and whatnot, but what about the batteries, electronic ink, plastic, and other toxic goodies that go into a Kindle? At least when you are done with a book, you can give it to someone else to read. When your Kindle is done, i.e., the thing has fried and no longer works, it’s off to the landfill, no easy way to recycle.
Mike Adams over at Natural News has another gripe with Kindle – Amazon.com can control the content and delete your books for whatever the reason. And you know, that is enough of a reason to have a hardbound copy of books that are truly important to you.
Mike’s solution to the problem, however, is to buy up books, rip them apart, scan them in, and create your own e-books. But really…this is not a good environmental move…just look at what’s involved:
I have a much better solution for consumers: Just buy the books at a local bookstore, chop off the binders, scan them and OCR them into text files. Then you can read them on any device (such as a Sony Reader, or your laptop, or whatever).
Of course, it’s a big operation: A good book binding chopper costs $1500 – $2000. A good double-sided scanning machine that can handle large books costs another $3000 or so. Decent OCR software costs another $300, and then you have to go through the song and dance of actually OCRing the files on a Windows computer somewhere. Not many people are willing to go through this trouble to read some books. But I am. Of course, I have other uses for the same equipment, so it’s easier for me to justify. Today, I have more than 1,500 books that I’ve scanned into text files. They all fit on an SD card that plugs right into a Sony Reader. (This is what I carry with me when I travel.)
OK, Mike, that is total overkill! You know, I don’t travel that much, but generally, one book or two is sufficient. Certainly not 1,500. Your mileage may vary.
I have seen Kindles in action and they do look pretty tempting though. If they can come up with one that’s not perpetually tethered to the mother company, I might be interested for certain types of books and other applications. Otherwise, I am happy with my old-fashioned hard-bound books, seeing as I’m not sure that going either way is environmentally “better.”
Interesting thoughts. I think you could make a case that paper books are more sustainable IF we harvested trees in a sustainable way.
Making paper less acidic so that it lasts like paper of old did would be part of the process. If it eats itself up, then more paper would be needed.
You can still read the Magna Carta because it was produced on a paper with no acid. Try pulling out a 50 year old newspaper…it will crumble in your hands.
These kind of issues are coming up everywhere these days. Not the last we will hear of it I suspect.
Just some thoughts!
dan
Several comments:
1. I love books. My parents are both academics and believed in the philosophy that whoever dies with the most books win. I like to be able to “improve” books by writing in my comments.
2. I love used books. Not only does it save resources and cost, but there is a certain sense of anonymous community that goes with reading a book that someone else has already read. A big problem with Kindle is that you can’t loan or give a book to someone else.
3. I’ve heard great things about electronic paper, the technology behind Kindle’s screen. e-Paper displays images by moving tiny colored balls around electrostatically and only consumes power when you change the display. A battery can last for weeks instead of hours, assuming they didn’t screw up the software.
4. I’ll wait for an open-source e-Reader, one that I can program myself and use as a general-purpose computer for word-processing, etc. (You know, like CherryPal but a real product.) I won’t expect it to show rapidly-changing graphics, but that’s what I have a wide-screen TV for. I don’t expect to read books on my TV, and I don’t want to watch wide-screen movies on a tiny screen.
5. I don’t want to pay for a wireless WAN connection. I would rather talk to my e-Reader over a USB cable, or at worst Wi-Fi. Wireless WAN is a great way to destroy battery life.
6. Time for a conspiracy theory! Besides the obvious desire for Amazon to make lots of money, their ability to upload and delete books at their whim also includes the ability to edit books at their whim. Who needs to burn books when you can simply change them at will to support whatever Orwellian program is in place. Or a hacker could get in and do it. Or nefarious Orwellian agents could do it, bypassing Amazon entirely.
This thought was inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s “Alphaville” (1965), where each hotel room has a dictionary instead of a Gideon Bible. However, the purpose of the dictionary is to tell citizens which words they are allowed to use, and words are deleted from the dictionary to control thought. One marvelous demonstration of this in the movie is that the phrases “I’m fine”, “thank you”, and “you’re welcome” are fused into a single general-purpose politeness — always spoken in its entirety — which loses the meaning of the individual components: “Je vais tres bien, merci, je vous en prie.”
Thank you both for your great comments…
Isn’t bamboo a good source of paper that can easily regrow? I’ll put that on my “need to research” list.
Industrial hemp is actually one of the best sources of paper. Hemp supporters say that the real reason for banning cannabis is not because it can be used a recreational drug, but rather to protect Randolf Hearst’s paper-making business from hemp paper and DuPont’s new nylon business from hemp rope. They basically bribed congress into banning hemp, and used propaganda to sell it to a still-gullable ‘Mercan public. (In fact, industrial hemp is quite different from the medicinal form of the plant.)
Making paper from help is much greener than making it from trees: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_hemp. And it grows like a weed!