Many people like to read a good book, newspaper and magazine and to actually feel the pages in your hand. Unfortunately, many trees are cut down to provide paper for books, newspapers and magazines.
Most newspapers are printed on virgin paper. It takes an entire forest – over 500,000 trees, to supply Americans with their Sunday newspapers every week, reports the City of Urbana. Using recycled paper instead of virgin paper for one print run of the Sunday edition of the New York Times would save 75,000 trees according to the Kingwood Green.
Books are a little better as they usually stay in use for many years, unless they are the throwaway paper-books that seem to be at most newsstands at train stations, motorway stops and airports. Classic books, signed originals, favorite novels, non-fiction reference books, and perhaps collections of comics and magazines, are usually treasured possessions that linger on shelves, occasionally being lovingly re-read again and again.
Eliminating newspapers, and even magazines, has been getting easier over the last few years as more mainstream news and magazine organizations provide their storylines online, either with free access, in return for subscribing or for paid-access. Even if we count the energy used to drive the computers and servers, plus the energy and resources to make the computers themselves, over the long run it must surely be better to get the electronic copies than the ‘real thing’. The computers are also useful for doing other things so we can’t just count their cost against downloading our favorite reads or the latest entertainment gossip about Hollywood stars.
But what about books? It is a bit of a drag to read a whole book on a computer, apart from getting a numb bum and a stiff neck, ploughing your way through Pride And Prejudice, War and Peace or Ulysses, you will also end up with eye-strain and upset other family members for hogging the computer all day and all night. There is an alternative, one that has been around for a few years but now has just got a lot more interesting … E-books and E-book Readers.
E-books are electronic copies of your favorite books, from classics to modernist, fiction, non-fiction, love stories, science, technical, science fiction – anything your reading heart desires. You also don’t have to endure slavedom to the desktop or laptop either. Sony, Amazon, Jinke, Netronix and IRex are all manufacturers of E-book Readers that generally have grayscale screens just a bit less than a normal letter-sized page (bit smaller than A4), around 0.5inch thick (13mm), weight approximately 450grams (1lb) and yet will hold around 8000 pages of a book with up to 30 hours of reading time. Amazon provides free wireless access in the US and a whole library full of e-books – and they are a lot cheaper than the ‘real’ thing.
Some of the E-book Readers can wirelessly download newspaper and magazine updates, as well as E-books. We aren’t so keen on the wireless aspect but anything that saves cutting down trees is a good idea.
The E-book Readers also just got a whole lot more interesting as Fujitsu recently released their FLEPia, an 8inch (200mm) 260,000 different colour screen, 0.5inch (12.5mm) thick, weighs 0.85lb (385g) and, with a 4Gbyte memory card it can hold 1.5million pages and has a 40 hour battery life.
It is a bit expensive at $1000 and some reports have said it has a slow page refresh rate. Either way, it is likely to be the way we read and access information in the future, electronic, media rich, wireless and treeless.
Resources
Fujitsu: www.frontech.fujitsu.com/
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/
Trevor Williams is a University of Victoria Mechanical Engineering PhD candidate specialising in renewable energy, power grid modelling and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. He has a bachelors in Aeronautical Engineering, a Masters in Management Science and over 23 years international experience in the space industry, having worked on Earth observation and telecommunications satellites. He is the author of the Eco Geek blog.
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