What's wrong with killing trees that were grown specifically for paper? You're just taking CO2 out of the atmosphere, helping reduce global climate change.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said "In the long term, a sustainable forest management strategy aimed at maintaining or increasing forest carbon stocks, while producing an annual sustained yield of timber, fibre or energy from the forest, will generate the largest sustained mitigation benefit".
I think you're overthinking it. I'm pretty sure other people in NZ are buying the same book, the marginal impact of shipping one copy must be very close to zero.
I've got a Kindle but I wouldn't trade my hardcover GEB for an electronic version.
Growing trees to make them into timber, pulp, etc. takes CO2 out of the atmosphere. As long as you're not growing them to burn them, it's one of the most effective CO2 sequestration methods we have.
77% of tree usage in the US is for timber and pulpwood. Fast-growing species are planted and harvested over a 10-20 year cycle so that as each section is cut down and replanted, another section is maturing. It's both sustainable business and an effective CO2 sink.
Thanks. That makes sense. My brain farted and I couldn't make the leap after "What's wrong with killing trees? You're just taking CO2 out of the atmosphere."
It's really not. If you want a citation for "growing trees takes CO2 out of the atmosphere", a high school bio book will suffice -- the carbon mass of the tree is carbon extracted from the atmosphere (and dead plant mass in soil, but the carbon there came from the atmosphere too).
If you want a citation for growing trees for timber and pulp as an effective CO2 sink, the citation is right in the grandfather post (an international climate change study by the IPCC including researchers from over a dozen countries, how much more authoritative can we get?), or just look up the paper and timber industries on wikipedia.
To anyone looking to purchase themselves some dead trees, I recommend that you pick up an older second hand copy. I have it on good authority that the recent 20th anniversary reprint is of a much lower quality, with crappy thin pages and less clear type.
Possessing both versions, I can confirm that the paper in the anniversary edition is thinner, but I think if anything the type is easier to read. YMMV, of course.
In my case, it's more a matter of praticality. My nook is lighter than a book and contains many books, so if I don't feel like reading one type of book I can switch easily.
Less importantly, I can hold the nook with one hand and still be able to turn pages. I travel by bus, so this is useful to me - my other hand can hold a coffee ;)
I have the original as hardcover, but also wanted to be able to read on the go on the iPad, so I downloaded the ebook.
It's a scan with OCR. Unfortunately the OCR is bad on many parts of the page - random occurences of %, ' and other characters are common. Also some words are totally unreadable.
Overall, I still read sometimes on the iPad, but having to go back to the hardcover if I'm totally lost.
Just because there is a PDF (or ePub etc.) of a book exists doesn't mean there is an official ebook. Some pirates scan books and either upload those each-page-is-one-image pdfs or (worse) they OCR these images andc upload that text.
