What better way to spend the last Saturday before the new semester than to spend it at Barnes and Noble, listening to people’s conversations and adding commentary in your head?
…which is exactly what I was doing today, approximately four hours ago. I was sitting at a table reading John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (which is an excellent book by the way), when I overheard a middle-aged couple sitting one table away discussing the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes and Noble Nook.
They legit sat there for a good half hour discussing the two eReaders and giving opinions on which one is better.
Personally? I’d rather kill six trees for a 300-page book. No really, I would.
Before you kill me, let me explain it to you why it’s actually more eco-friendly to buy books than to buy an eReader, be it the Kindle, the Nook, the Sony Reader, or whatever it is that you decide to go with.
Well, first off, according to activist Annie Leonard's The Story of Stuff, 99% of all electronics a person buys are discarded or neglected six months after their purchase. You know what that means? You only keep 1% of the things you buy. The rest of it is either tossed into the attic, basement, forgotten under the passenger seat of your car, or shipped off to Public Storage. Odds are, you’ll purchase your eReader, and one month later they’ll come out with a newer, sleeker, must-have version of it, and you’ll be suffering another case of the gimmes.
Then comes the issue of pricing. People think that eReaders are cheaper…eventually. Well the eReader itself costs a good $260.00, and the average eBook costs an additional $10.00. An average paperbac.book costs $15.00. If you do the math, you would have to purchase 53 eBooks to break even, and the pricing is only significantly different after you hit the 57 eBooks mark.
Well, 53 paperback books? That’s 318 trees! Almost half an acres’ worth of trees!
Well, my dear friend, you aren’t considering an eReader’s entire life cycle analysis. The plastics and metals used to make these eReaders are imported from all over the globe. That’s a lot of carbon footprints. Another point to consider is the disposal/ recycling process. Do you have any idea how much energy would be needed to recycle a Kindle? A lot. And that energy is released in the form of green house gases.
An eReader, in my opnion, is another typical example of lazy environmentalism. What does that mean?
Think of Britain's wannabe prime minister, David Cameron, cycling to Parliament followed by a limo carrying his papers.
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