Lately I’ve been reading a lot about Amazon.com’s new reading device, “Kindle.” It seems that many people enjoy this new way of reading; in fact a saw a guy reading from one on the metro the other day.
I can’t help but wonder: Is Kindle a good option for green travelers?
Here are the positives:
It’s lightweight = fewer books = less weight = less energy required to transport
Thousands and thousands of books aren’t printed = fewer trees cut down
But the negatives:
It’s an electronic = energy required to produce
It’s an electronic = energy required to use
It’s an electronic = when it dies it ends up leaching chemicals and taking up space in a landfill
Books can be reused over and over (I get most of my books from the library or used book store).
When they are thrown out they decompose, but when a Kindle dies? I think of the picture Kimberly found for her 31 Reason to Travel Travel: In Pictures post.
photo credit: art_es_anna
What do you think? Does the Kindle make sense as an environmentally sound option?
My gut tells me no.
Recommended Reading:
{ 17 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m with you there! My favourite paperback isn’t going to need a warranty and it isn’t going to malfunction in the middle of a trip. Also, if the book gets a little damaged, it has character. A cracked or scratched electronic device is just damaged. Call me old-fashioned, but I like the look and feel of a book.
Also, you have to buy everything you want to put on a Kindle. I’m big fan of going to the library, shopping at used bookstores and trading books with friends. The Kindle discourages all of those practices.
I can see how a lot of people would get a lot of use out of a Kindle, but I don’t think it’s a good fit for me.
@Elizabeth: You’re right about trading books with friends (or leaving them at hostels) . In a way the Kindle disconnects people.
Actually, you can get a huge quantity of free content for the Kindle – any text file or DRM free Mobi (.mobi and .prc) book can be transferred as is. PDF, DOC and other formats are easily converted and transferred (do it yourself for free or pay 10 cents to email it to Amazon and have them do it, as well as load it on the Kindle for you). You can’t put DRM’d content in other formats on it … but you can’t do that with many other readers, either (most support one proprietary DRM format and the various open formats, as the Kindle does).
Yes, it take electricity to use it (but you could easily produce all of it yourself with a single solar charger, and not a big one at that). But it takes paper to print a book (with all the pollution from that process), then transport, printing and many, many transports before you get the book (using lots of oil), as the materials are shipped, printed, distributed, then the unsold ones carted back and forth before being landfilled. And once you own the physical book, you need to rent space to keep it (assuming you don’t recycle it back into the economy in some other way). As to which is worse for the environment, a lot will depend on your personal buying habits: did it save a few thousand books from the delivery cycle, plus your few hundred drives to the bookstore? Or perhaps just a single newspaper delivery stopped would both pay for it in a year and keep several hundred pounds of paper from being trucked to you and then having to be recycled.
@Karen- Thanks for the excellent comment! You make an excellent point. I wonder how much paper waste is saved through the Kindle and how that compares to the electronic waste.
I’ve been thinking of getting one for a while, but the price is still too high, and I’ve heard a version two will be coming soon. I think that the math about whether it’s green, will depend on how many books you normally would buy. Maybe a better option is to borrow books, or buy second hand, so you’re not contributing towards either source of pollution– books or kindle!
@Christine; I’m sure prices will drop in time. It will be like ipods and iphones; the prices go down and the glitches get worked out. Sometimes it’s better not to pave the way
It may use less paper but I just can’t read on a screen….im used to the whole internet scanning thing. I’m going to stick with my books.
i’m a bit biased because i love the kindle. however, using ebooks saves a ton of trees. especially when you factor in newspapers and textbooks. also the eInk technology makes for a really good screen. the rub is that getting your hands on a Kindle is necessary before you can actually see for yourself what it looks like and what the screen looks like.
i actually found this post when i was looking for places to spread the word about a social network for kindle owners and book lovers we launched yesterday evening.
We’re in pre-Alpha – Would appreciate it if you would join and help build the community (amazonkindle.ning.com – moving to a more book oriented url during alpha)
More details at http://thekindle.wordpress.com/2008/07/12/social-network-for-kindle-owners-and-book-lovers/ including ‘3 Free Kindles in the first 3 months’ promotion and other information.
@abhi Thanks for your thoughts. I had forgotten about newspapers and the Kindle as an alternative to Newspapers.
Hi, Elizabeth.
My husband and I are on an open-ended road trip, during which he’ll be working from the road as a programmer. Normally he’d have access to a huge programming reference library at home, so we wanted to figure out a space efficient way to make sure he had the information he needed on the road to do his job well…all while we’re travelling in our Mini Cooper.
He researched a number of ebook readers, and wasn’t that impressed with the Kindle. Instead, he bought an iLiad by iRex. It is actually electronic paper, which means it is remarkably energy efficient: you only use electricy to change the print on the page, but it isn’t back lit, and there’s no power in use when you are reading a page. (We are also building a solar charger for it.)
We’re responsible about donating / repurposing / or safely disposing of our electronics, and I also expect we’ll have the iLiad for a good long while. We’re both really happy with it.
I don’t know the numbers off the top of my head, but I’m curious about the green math of the energy required to produce one iLiad and a thousand pdf books, vs the energy to produce, store and transport a thousand paper books.
Don’t get me wrong, I love print books, too! Just that in our current nomadic circumstances, our iLiad has been an unexpectedly wonderful solution.
I love my Kindle. I have about six hundred books on it and subscribe to several blogs, mags, and newspapers. Anything that is not copyrighted you can upload to the Kindle for free through web sites such as gutenberg.org or manybooks.net. You can use the solio solar charger for long distance hikes or when you are away from electrical hookups. I have enough reading to keep me busy on a lonely desert isle for years.
Seems to me the negative environmental side effects of a Kindle would still be less severe than cutting down trees, putting ink to paper, packaging and shipping books all over the world. Both processes use electricity and both processes produce electronic waste (printing presses die too). My gut tells me the Kindle is more environmentally friendly, especially if powered by “green” electricity.
Consider the overall situation too, all those warehouses and stores and libraries that hold all these books use up electricity and other resources and prevent us from using the land for other purposes. I’m sure we could recycle Kindles, and if we put up a windmill in place of every bookstore, library and warehouse I’m positive we could power all those Kindles in an environmentally friendly way.
It sounds as though everyone is incredibly pleased with their Kindles. Maybe down the road when the price comes down I will consider buying one. It does sound convenient.
I like the Kindle, it’s easy on the eyes, and it’s for reading, plus has the added benefit of a free wireless Web browser and you don’t need a hotspot. I get free books off sites like gutenberg.org, never run out of free reading. I like paper books too, don’t get me wrong, and if I’m eating and reading I don’t want to spill on an expensive electronic device, but a little sauce on a paperback just makes it saucy. However, for reading in bed or while on a train. Also I don’t live very near a bookstore, and this way I can browse thousands of books online and download them without having to go anywhere–and the range is a lot more diverse than your big chain bookstore. Amazon gives you sizable free samples of books that they sell, so you can browse. The battery life is long esp if you don’t go online. I don’t think it uses a whole lot of power as it does not light up. True that it creates waste but so do books and newspapers–the trees, the process, the pollution, the transportation, the disposal, the space they take up in my small home.
See http://www.marmolradzinerprefab.com/blog/2008/03/11/calculate_this/
The relevant part reads: “Caculate this! Determining a product’s carbon footprint Giving new meaning to the idea of a “scientific calculator,” IDC has a fantastic life cycle analysis tool that calculates the embodied energy and carbon footprint in any product. You just enter some basic data about a product’s composition and manufacture, and it works out the energy used in the product’s extraction, manufacture, transport, use, and disposal.
One of our architects recently gave the calculator a whirl by estimating the carbon footprint of Amazon’s new Kindle Wireless Reading Device. He answered a few questions and found that the Kindle has the same footprint as 30 paperbacks ordered from Amazon’s store. So if you’re going to read more than 30 books on your Kindle, it’s greener to purchase the digital reader than the paper copies.”
I just gotta say I love my kindle and the cheap books.
My taste is a bit rough but I enjoyed “The Misogynist” by Emily Downs.
It can be a bit vulgar at times. Be warned. But it’s cheap.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Misogynist/dp/B001V5J4VO/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1246301307&sr=1-2
She is the bestselling author of “Lisa Loves Girls”
http://www.amazon.com/Lisa-Loves-Girls-ebook/dp/B002EZZJ4Q/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1246298800&sr=1-7
2 books for under 2 bucks. THe kindle will own publishing.
Thank you very much, I did really like the response to my thread, and post replies have been really awesome. It could have never been better. Even hiring someone for this could have never met the experience all posters here have, thanks for saving dollars and adding really good information to this post to make things really easy and workable for us. Thanks again and great work.