Will Paper books fade away?

[dmaul1114]

Originally Posted by Robertb

Dear All:

My two cents is based on the COST to obey environmental constraints. ALL paper for hardcover and paperback books is bleached paper... giving it that white we prize. That bleaching releases what is known as PaperMill Sludge. PaperMill sludge contains 32 known carcinogens and so far cannot be remedied. You cannot burn it, bury it, or crush it to where it will not get into the groundwater. You can only contain it and containment, so far, is a disaster.

My point is that new regulations for PaperMill Sludge are enormously costly. Guess who pays, folks? Now, when you can buy a new eBook for $7.99 (coming soon) or buy a paperback for $24.99 (within two years)... which one are you going to do??

THAT is why the clock is ticking on paperbacks and hard covers. The sun is just rising on the Dawn of the eBook!!

That's all assuming that they just don't go some other route and make paper without bleaching--i.e. just not have it as white.

You can be pretty sure they'll find ways to cut corners so they don't have to raise prices and hurt their sales. And eBooks won't be the main way to do that right away as the market is still small compared to paper books.

[fugazied]

It's obvious they will fade away, but I think they will remain as a niche product for many years to come.

Kind of in the same way that you can still get limited releases of vinyl, you might get small print runs (1000-2000) of books for book collectors. I think many libraries and archives will continue to get those limited print runs of books, or might print copies for archiving.

But yeah as soon as we have paper thin LCDs (like we have in movies), paper will be redundant.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by Robertb

Dear All:

My two cents is based on the COST to obey environmental constraints. ALL paper for hardcover and paperback books is bleached paper... giving it that white we prize. That bleaching releases what is known as PaperMill Sludge. PaperMill sludge contains 32 known carcinogens and so far cannot be remedied. You cannot burn it, bury it, or crush it to where it will not get into the groundwater. You can only contain it and containment, so far, is a disaster.

...

THAT is why the clock is ticking on paperbacks and hard covers. The sun is just rising on the Dawn of the eBook!!

The environmental costs of creating, using, and disposing of electronic gizmos that get replaced every two years is not anywhere close to zero. And ebooks themselves require physical storage with a relatively short half-life, and infrastructure to move them about.

Don't get me wrong, I like my gizmos, but this problem has not been solved by a long shot, it is a far more complicated problem to recycle electronic gizmos, reduce raw material usage to a sustainable level, and it is far from clear to me that we are making significant progress in doing so. So I question the assumption that 'ebooks are eco-friendly'. But I'd like my reading to be as guilt free as possible, so by all means I'd like to see such claims supported by evidence!

By contrast I can easily imagine printed books that we could compost and grow vegetables in (if not eat for dinner), or recycle to make new books. Actually that has probably already been demonstrated, but such practices are not in wide use yet.

The environmental costs will never be zero in any case. Short of giving up books completely, we need to make progress on as many fronts as possible. And maybe stop publishing all crappy books in any form whatsoever...

[hansl]

Originally Posted by Robertb

Dear All:

My two cents is based on the COST to obey environmental constraints. ALL paper for hardcover and paperback books is bleached paper... giving it that white we prize. That bleaching releases what is known as PaperMill Sludge. PaperMill sludge contains 32 known carcinogens and so far cannot be remedied. You cannot burn it, bury it, or crush it to where it will not get into the groundwater. You can only contain it and containment, so far, is a disaster.

My point is that new regulations for PaperMill Sludge are enormously costly. Guess who pays, folks? Now, when you can buy a new eBook for $7.99 (coming soon) or buy a paperback for $24.99 (within two years)... which one are you going to do??

THAT is why the clock is ticking on paperbacks and hard covers. The sun is just rising on the Dawn of the eBook!!

I agree in principle with your bleaching concern. Regarding your pricing example this sounds more like an author exploitation. And I would prefer a hardcover book now to a pb in two years.

The environmental ace has already been played regarding reader hardware, but I also hope you don't have a car and don't live in a house with a bad insulation which needs heating or air conditioning system. What BTW is your water use policy? You are not using aluminum foil, are you? Or gold in any form? And so on and so on. And when the oil will be gone (see the documentary "A Crude Awakening - The Oil Crash"), I'll still have my pbooks keeping me warm inside and outside, well, er, for a another week or so. Civilisation is an ecological pain.

However, I'm much in favour of reducing paper use. So we could start with things with low personal value like TV-program papers, newspapers, ads, any sort of printed information with an expiration date which a private household would throw away anyway after a few weeks.

Those collecting newspapers for the historical record could access these in the Library of Congress and get a searchable index for free. Storing each and every Bit on an own disk is ecologically not so sound, I think.

hansl