Paper or Pixels?

  

Hey Mr. Green,

I'm a professor, and one of my students lauded me as "the greenest person" she knows. Then she said she bought an e-reader and wasn't buying any more books. I couldn't help but wonder if, in fact, such devices are environmentally wise. Surely it takes a lot of energy to create, power, and dispose of them. What's your analysis?

 

-Peter in Macomb, Illinois

 

You shouldn't rush out to buy an e-reader in the belief that you're saving the world. You'd have to read somewhere from 20 to 60 books on one just to offset the global-warming emissions created by making and using the device, according to the studies I've seen.

So, for a serious bookworm, e-books can be more energy efficient than hard copies. But if you read superslowly or spend hours pondering paragraphs, your e-reader may fall behind, as it does require extra energy. To put things in perspective, though, neither e-readers nor books rival other energy sinks. Drive five miles to the bookstore and back, and you'll use more energy than it takes to make a book.

But there's a wild card in all this, namely the library card. My numbers are based on a single use of a book. Yet each time somebody reads a library book, its environmental burden is reduced, because its production requires only a onetime resource use, whereas the e-device needs power for each use. Moreover, paper books can survive hundreds of years and readings; the e-reader, if it has its ancestors' DNA, is doomed to a comparatively brief existence.

Hence, as Nicholson Baker concluded in his cantankerous book about books, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, it may be premature to wantonly abandon paper tomes. And there will always be a place for public libraries.

Want more great green tips like this? Get them here.

 

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I love libraries! However, what happens when you factor in the energy necessary to power libraries some 350 days a year?

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So if you refrain from driving to a bookstore and download a book instead, is that better, assuming you read a lot and stretch the life of your e-reader as long as possible?

Also, in the case of iPad, the device has many other uses, so that has to count for something. Also I'm sure the devices vary in the amount of toxic parts, energy used to create them, and recyclability.

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