I found this interesting article about the impact of e-books on the environment, and the impact of printed books on the environment. It was extremely interesting to see that although we love the printed book, e-books are much more environmentally friendly than the book. Although I love printed books, sometimes we have to make sacrifices about what we like in order to save what we need – the earth, for example.
I found this excerpt from the article to be interesting:
What is not clear is the degree to which the studies discussed above address the impact of the servers, modems and infrastructure that makes the delivery of E-books possible. To be certain energy demand
for storing and transmitting data over the internet is increasing rapidly and poses a very serious environmental challenge. However the total portion of data storage that is associated with E-books, while unknown, is at this point assumed to be quite minimal compared to the total content of the internet. Additional research should be conducted to determine the environmental impacts associated with data storage/transmission for E-books.”
If everyone converted to e-books, there might be a bigger environmental impact because of the energy required for the e-books themselves as well as the servers and technology needed to support the e-books.
I never really thought about how “green” electronic readers are to our environment. I think that is an amazing benefit to this new technology.