BY: DUSTIN BATTY
It has been a difficult time for book readers these past few years. We have been combating the futurists, the technophiles, the acolytes of the digital revolution who have denounced the printed word and declared it obsolete. We have rejected this prognosis, scoffing the e-reader advertisements and continuing to purchase our hardcovers and paperbacks. And our efforts have not been in vain; according to Fortune magazine, 2015 saw over 571 million print books sold in the United States alone. So, in one way, we were right. Print isn’t dead. But in another way, we were dreadfully, tragically wrong. You can also learn more with an Intuitive Reader.
Print isn’t dead, true. But it is obsolete. And this is coming from someone whose personal collection has numbered over a thousand. Trust me, I am well aware of the advantages that print books have over their digital brethren. Print books can easily be lent to friends, for example, and a full bookshelf is much more impressive to look at than a single e-reader. It is much easier to find endnotes, indexes, and glossaries when reading a print book. E-books have to be charged, and you can’t put sticky-notes or write marginalia in them. Perhaps most noticeably, they don’t have the substance, the weight, or the texture of a printed book, and they never get that old book smell.
But e-books have one advantage that excuses all of these shortcomings: they cause significantly less environmental damage. I will rephrase the above-cited statistic: in just one year, the residents of a single country purchased over 571 million printed books. If everyone in the United States bought an e-reader instead, that would only be about 325 million products. And those would be one-time purchases, whereas at this rate, another 600 million books will be sold every year.
The printing process isn’t exactly environmentally friendly, either. From logging, to the pulping process, to the emissions involved with the creation of ink, to the disposal of discarded books, and many other steps along the way, the ecological impact of printing books is much higher than most people realize. And thanks to the development of the e-reader, it is now entirely unnecessary. We need to forego the vanity, convenience, or preference that draws us to printed books, and acknowledge our moral obligation to use the significantly less environmentally damaging product. Without sacrifices like these, we will never create an environmentally stable society. FernGully, The Lorax, and A Friend of the Earth will have been written in vain.
Don’t worry, I’m not demanding that we purge our bookshelves and discard the books we’ve already purchased. That wouldn’t help anything; it would simply add to the problem. Nor am I suggesting that we stop scouring used bookstores for old gems. Anything that is out of print is fair game, because purchasing them won’t cause more to be printed. All I am asking is, any time we want to buy a book that is still in print, we settle for an electronic copy rather than a physical.
From e-readers to audiobooks, there are a variety of means through which we can enjoy the works of our favourite authors without encouraging the further destruction of ecosystems. And since these options are readily available, we are morally obligated to use them.
