Read An E-Book Week 2008

How "Green" is Your Reading Material?

"Carbon Footprint", "Environmentally Friendly" and "Green". Have you considered these words when it comes to your reading material?

We're encouraged to buy, use and dispose with the environment in mind. While it's easy to recognize the negative impact of excess packaging and chemical content in many of the products we purchase, it's not so easy when it comes to books, magazines and newspapers.

We do have alternatives other than paper for our reading material. Many books, newspapers and magazines are created electronically. No trees are cut to produce them. No ink is used to put the words on the page. No fossil fuel is used to run presses or trucks to move the books around the country. Heated storage facilities are not required to warehouse e-books as they remain within your computer.

March 2nd - 8th , 2008 is Read An E-Book Week. The week is set aside to educate consumers about reading electronic books and other reading material. E-books are delivered to the end user electronically. They are read on devices such as the new Sony portable reader or Amazon's Kindle. They are destroyed with the push of a delete button, without ever taking up room in a landfill.

It takes 24 trees to produce a ton of printing paper, the type normally used for books, 12 trees are harvested for a ton of newsprint. Up to 35% of books printed for consumers (down from nearly 60% several years ago) are never read. They are eventually returned to the publisher for disposal in landfills. Given that a mature tree can produce as much oxygen in a season as 10 people inhale in a year, a serious alternative to paper books, magazines and newspapers needs to be considered. That alternative is e-books.

Before purchasing your next paper book, magazine or newspaper, consider your carbon footprint commitment. Read electronically.

Read An E-Book Week, March 2 - 8, 2008. For more information please visit www.domokos.com/readebookweek.html

I happened to be in the middle of reading an electronic copy of A Billion Bootstraps, borrowed from the public library, when I saw this post. Finished it yesterday and borrowed another, but as it turned out to be over 600 pages, I doubt I'll finish it in the three-week loan period, let alone before e-book week is over. (One of the downsides of e-books is you can't always tell how long they are by the links.) And I have been trying to get through some PDFs I downloaded a while ago.