Eco Alley
Living Green with Connie Pumphrey
A little light reading
The book world was offended when Amazon announced that Kindle sales outnumber printed book sales. I’m not surprised because we’re people on the go and iPod and Kindle technology allows us to have weightless reading material with us at all times. I love reading and spend about 400 hours per year enjoying books although I haven’t purchased a printed book for myself in years. I enjoy them via my iPod or CDs from the library. The down side of this technology is there are no pictures and the upside are the artists who read the audio versions of books. They can add immeasurably to the experience by their accent/dialect/knowledge of the material. On the other hand, my idea of a perfect Saturday morning is sitting on the patio with a great cup of coffee and a newspaper or magazine (the paper kind).
Every year, tens of millions of trees are cut down in the production of books. Publishing the Harry Potter books used 8.4 million trees - not to mention the water, ink and energy it takes to publish them. The $40 billion book industries haven’t made significant progress on limiting environmental impact. Finding better and cleaner ways to do things takes commitment, research dollars and infrastructure upgrades and money is tight these days. I LOVE their products but really want them to find better ways to produce them.
We have options…If you love books, look for used copies or rent your books (BookSwim). My book club doesn’t choose anything that can’t be obtained from the library even if we must compete among ourselves and other clubs for the limited copies. It isn’t about the $$$ because most everyone could afford to buy the book - it’s about reusing and recycling what is already available.
Comments (0)
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 11/17/10 at 08:34 PM
Masthead Photo by