One of the things people tend to take for granted about e-books is that they are more “environmentally friendly” than paper books. E-books, after all, don’t “kill trees” for wood pulp.
However, a story in PBS’s Mediashift section points out that e-books, and the data centers and other cloud services that support them, use electricity. Driven by technological expansion, the USA’s use of electricity doubled from 2000 to 2006, and looks like it might double again from 2006 to 2011.
And much of that electricity is produced by burning coal, and much of that coal comes from mountaintop-removal mines—which in turn cause major deforestation and pollution of rivers and streams.
The article doesn’t make a whole lot of effort to be neutral—it’s easy to tell, when it calls the explosives used in mountaintop mining “up to 100 times as strong as ones that tore open the Oklahoma City Federal building,” as if that fact has any relevance at all—but it does make a point. (And that’s leaving aside the implications of toxic materials used in computers, which is an entire other matter.) It’s easy to focus on one aspect of a manufacturing process and ignore the implications of other aspects.
I suspect that it is unrealistic to lay mountaintop-removal mining directly at the feet of the e-book industry, or even the Internet as a whole. There are probably a number of factors that have contributed to this demand for power, of which the net is only one. However, a little environmental awareness never hurt anyone, and it is good to remember that trees are not only the cost of paper.
Printing presses, bookstores, and warehouses require electricity, too. There’s an energy price for everything. But the requirements for ebooks seem slight compared to those for paper books. And they don’t take up much storage or bandwidth compared to streaming media.
A possible method of comparison of energy cost for paper or screen books is to discount the common overhead associated with both. Leave either a print book or a computer out in the rain and they become unreadable.
Beyond that there is a difference in prerequisites for reading. Print books require space and screen books require electricity. Space for shelves and book opening are needed for print libraries. On the other side there is nothing more illegible that a black screen.
These prerequisite requirements of legibility may be a wash and the full life cycle costs of both products could be debatable and complex. Imagine mapping the life cycle costs of batteries! Other energy costs are in delivery, device display and data storage, especially in a longer term. Here print has a distinctive attribute which is a single one time cost for delivery, device display and data storage while these costs are all separated and extendable with electronic books
Yes there is an environmental impact to electronic books, but frankly I have yet to see a compelling case made to suggest that ebooks would represent anything but a tiny fraction of a drop in the bucket of American Energy usage. Certainly I find it hard to believe that the environmental footprint of an ebook is larger than a paper book.
Lets consider the following. All books are going to be stored by the publishers as electronic media regardless of how the books are going to be distributed. In other words, the computers and disk farms are going to be used regardless of whether or not the books are delivered as e-books or paper books. Now I will grant that one might have more powerful computers for the storing and distribution of e-books, but the difference may not be as much as one might think (If I remember correctly, Manybooks.net was and might still be run from a mac mini).
Indeed, I think many outside the tech community might be surprised at exactly how small a system could be used to store and distribute a truly massive book collection. Consider that 1 terabyte disks are now common. If we assume the average novel is about 2 megabytes, a single terabyte disk could store approximately half a million books. A single rack of disks, like those commonly found in almost any data center could store tens of millions of books.
Now I will agree that a paper book generally requires very little impact to read (not zero however unless you only plan on reading by sunlight) and ebooks require electricity. That being said, an e-ink or passive LCD ebook reader does not use much electricity — certainly far less than cell phones. In fact, I suspect that simple readers which don’t include wifi, could be run off of solar cells the way that some calculators and watches are.
Paper itself isn’t stripped really thinly off of standing trees; pulping and paper production mills use prodigious amounts of electricity, also usually provided by those coal-fired plants, creating the paper before it’s ever printed on or distributed. (I challenge both the assertion that the “majority of their power needs” come from “sustainably-managed forests,” and the idea that a “sustainably managed forest” is anything but another PR dodge to avoid the word “deforestation.” Replacing a mature tree, pulped in hours, with a sapling that will take decades to mature, is not “sustainably managing” a forest.)
And yes, the article ignores other “inconvenient” factors, like the intense chemical pollution being dumped into local watersheds by the pulping mills.
The only thing this article is properly attacking is the coal industry, and even there, it is doing a bad job by suggesting that “chances are” Appalachia is providing the coal that runs your local plant, and in the same article pointing out that only 23% of the nation’s coal comes from there. Nice math, guys.
So, once again, a few facts:
* It takes 12 trees to produce a ton of printing paper—24 trees for higher grade writing paper.*
* A mature tree can produce as much oxygen in a season as 10 people inhale in a year.
* Only 5% of the paper used in the book industry is recycled.
* Up to 35% of books printed for consumers (down from nearly 60% several years ago) are never read. They are returned to the publisher and end up in landfills.
* 71% of the world’s paper supply comes from natural forests, rather than tree farms**
* Conservatree—Trees Into Paper
** World Business Council for Sustainable Development
And in the meantime, let’s push for less polluting energy forms, like solar, wind, tidal and geothermal, and stop subsidizing Big Oil, Big Coal, and shoddy articles like this.
Excellent points Bill. The costing in energy for the product in hand may well favor the screen. I particularly appreciate your point that all books, paper or screen, are digital lending an equivalence there.
There are other kinds of costing not yet discussed. These are costs for sustainability. A large agenda at the moment is assurance of sustainability both in content authentication and outright persistence of service. Libraries are now looking at initiatives such as JStor, Portico and HathiTrust to certify scanned legacy print. The research libraries also have a good record of persistence and preservation mission that is necessarily lacking in the corporate world. In other words, research libraries factor a “cost” for culture transmission provided by reliable reaccess. In this perspective print has yet to be obsolete and can bridge our cultural needs.