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!

Isn’t bamboo a good source of paper that can easily regrow? I’ll put that on my “need to research” list.

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.”

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