Tim W has a piece up at TCS about Greenpeace's idiocies when it comes to books and paper. Of course, as I noted in my publishing article last week, Greenpeace is unable to propose that readers of Harry Potter read non-paper edtions of the book because the publisher/author has refused to put out a legal ebook, however one might think that this would be possible for other books.
Yet, curiously, a search for "ebook" on Greenpeace's website shows no hits and a search for "book" shows a great deal of stuff about using recycled paper and being "ancient forest friendly" paper without mentioning the possibility of buying eBooks. Of course I suppose that switching on a computer to read a book is contributing to energy use and thus to "glow ball vharmink", but I'm pretty sure that the joules of energy needed to either recycle or produce the paper and print the book, let alone the energy consumed in shipping any one of the millions of them to its reader, is far greater than that consumed by my buying an eBook and reading it online. And of course the paper industry, while far better these days than it was, still uses a lot of really nasty chemicals and thereby hurts the environment, something that the consumption of elections doesn't do.
I winder how long it will be before the penny drops? While I'm rarely in agreement with the green movement, if they got serious about promoting ebooks (and emagazines) then I might start being a bit more sympathetic. Unfortunately of course all they do so far is produce some inane ecological calculator that makes it seem like the whole world is losing all its trees for paper when, IIRC, world forestry cover is in fact increasing, particularly in the developed world. As a commenter at EU Rota puts it, George missed out a couple of words when he ended: