books or an e-reader?

So the issue this morning is one we've talked about since we watched our fellow travellers reading books on e-readers on the beach in Mexico:
In the interests of lowering our carbon footprint, should we buy an e-reader?
When I took the bus to Nayarit last fall, I carried two small packs. One had my clothes, meds and such. The other was filled with books... mostly used paperbacks purchased for a dollar or two from one of our great used-book stores here in Corvallis (oh yea... also my HP Netbook). It seemed a bit crazy, carrying all those books (there were 13 of them, and I still ran out before the end of the Mexican sojourn). So we were impressed by the numbers of folks who arrived with Kindles. Each would extol the virtues of the readers, claiming to have downloaded 20 or 30 books from the library before departing from home. Turning a page is as easy as tapping the screen. The machine remembers where you are in the book.

So why not just bite the bullet and get one? As usual, such decisions are not so simple. We needed to look at all the 'unintended consequences': Do we really want a world without real paper books? Do we want to put our wonderful used-book stores out of business? And what about the actual footprint of the devices? So I learned that, if you take a hard look at the footprint of the average e-reader, you find a trail that equals about 330# of carbon dioxide per machine (that includes the mining of all ingredients, manufacture, shipping etc etc). The average book (new, paperback) has a footprint of about 16# CO2, but then you have to look at the other consequences: the millions of trees cut, the fact that 11% of all fresh water, including some fossil water, is used to produce paper, and the fact that the paper industry produces 153 billion gallons of highly-contaminated water each year.

So... what to do? We're leaning toward getting a mid-range Kindle. It'll mean encouraging our local library to do more for folks who want to bypass the trips to the library (another carbon savings). It'll mean fighting over the thing when we travel. Or maybe reading aloud? The jury is out... no clear decision on the future of reading in our family. We'll keep asking questions and weighing pros and cons. And don't forget to keep your dog indoors at night... we're waffling on the issue of vegetarianism too.

corvallisgadfly@gmail.com

Kirk