More sustainable paper books

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c24pqrvvll9o

"Initially he wasn’t sure about Sustainable Typesetting. But after seeing that a 19% reduction in pages could lead to at least a 10% cost savings, while readability actually improved, Mr Miller has become a fan."

Fun! But I imagine marketing considerations will prevail.

That also raises the question of whether it might be more sustainable for writers to write less wordy books, or perhaps to refrain from publishing short books until they have reached a certain number of pages

Concerns regarding the sustainability of print these days has permeated much of the publishing community over the past two or three years. Europe is leading the charge in some respects. See https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2024/08/20/ensuring-the-sustainability-of-pr...

>3 jillmwo: Theoretically, POD sounds like a great idea. Since each copy is a one off, the customer should be able to influence things like font and font size, even paper choices. In practice, I twice a few years ago ordered POD copies of works I was interested in reading. Too small print, and that blurry on poor paper means that I still haven't been able to read them. It will be a very long time before I try that again.

What impressed me in the article I posted was that it didn't just make the print smaller, but also easier to read. I'm currently waiting for a book that I hope will come in the original hard cover edition, because I don't want to deal with paperback binding on a book over 400 pages long, or the smaller print. We'll see if they took my statement that I would not accept the PB seriously.

I was just having a discussion about this the other day — although printing and such obviously expends resources and energy, demand for books (and other paper) has a really wonderful side effect for the environment — it is an economic incentive for a company to buy a bunch of land, plant a bunch of trees, and replant a new tree for each one it cuts down. If there was no demand for paper, the companies which already own this land would raze the trees and use the land for some other economic purpose, like a factory.

I have read about (I would link the article, except I can't seem to find it now) a prototype for POD 'vending machines' which contain the files for a certain amount of books, and will print, bind, and deposit a book on the spot after it is ordered. Would be a great thing to find at an airport, shopping mall, or even a waiting room.

I think the most sustainable books are the ones we get secondhand, though!

I'm happy to see these changes being made, but wouldn't the more environmentally conscious choice be e-books? Improve e-readers, bring the price down, make e-books more easily available (including converting older books that aren't yet available in e-formats), and work to move away from paper books entirely.

Not really. E-book formats on devices people already use may be more environmentally conscious, but the fact is that the plastic, metals, and especially the rare trace elements required to construct modern electronic devices, especially portable ones like laptops and e-readers, are terrible for the environment, and the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries eventually stop recharging and must be discarded, and new ones purchased. In most cases, mobile devices end up trashed in landfills in less than 5 years, which is downright awful for the planet.

This isn't going into energy consumption to charge these devices, recharge them, the servers that are needed to hold digital copies of the books, etc...

Once a paper book is published and transported to its destination, its impact on the environment is pretty much over. It requires no charging, and it is biodegradable. A Kindle, not so much.

I would expect the energy consumption part of the equation to be less of a problem as we continue the shift towards renewable energy. Given that print and e- both have pros and cons, have there been any reliable studies comparing the environmental impact of the two formats? (Other than the sort of we're good/they're bad "studies" that industry groups are always releasing, that is.)

>8 KeithChaffee: Right, energy consumption for digital devices (and machines which are used to produce them — and paper books, for that matter) will matter less as we move to renewable energy. The mining for rare earth metals and creation/depletion/disposal of lithium-ion batteries will continue to be a major environmental hazard until we find some other materials, which we don't seem to be doing any time soon. Furthermore, we need a huge cultural shift about disposal of electronics: about not upgrading to the newest device just because it's available, about companies quitting the habit of forced obsolescence to sell more, about repairing instead of replacing when possible, and finally about responsible disposal: recycling electronics, and never dumping them in landfills to start fires and poison the soil/water.

Until then, paper books and e-readers will never even be close in terms of environmental impact.

>6 KeithChaffee: A world without paper books. Just put me on the mothership and get me out of here. Not a place I would want to live. If the world is going to be choked by something please let it be a musty old book.

Even in sheer terms of how many items need to be made in a certain period of time: There are books in this very collection dating back 150 years or more, which are still legible, albeit needing gentler handling. The oldest electronic device I have is from the nineties, about 30 years old or so, and I can barely use it because most of the things I use a computer for in our era require the internet, and that computer requires a wired internet connection, which I no longer have. In simple terms of longevity, we can see the damage done when one item can last 150 years and, if it outlasts its usefulness, be recycled or composted safely, and the other item is no longer relevant in just 30 years' time, and little or none of it can be recycled, and nothing is biodegradable. If I print a paper book today, and invent an e-reader upon which I publish the same, in 150 years I will have needed one paper book, maybe 2 if I take bad enough care of it, and 5 e-readers, if I'm extremely lucky that they don't break or get too slightly wet or whatever, and I hold on to electronics far past when every other person I know has gotten rid of them.

(I still retain this computer A. to keep the thing out of landfill, and B. to run more RAM-intensive programs, which I install and move any needed files around using USB, because a good computer that can run hard is more and more expensive and rare these days. Someday, when I get caught up to modern technology, I hope to figure out what exactly it takes to add new hardware to an older CPU, so I can maybe someday have Wi-Fi on it.)

Actually, almost all of electronic waste is recyclable. The problem is that we don't do it. We have so few regulations that would require it, we haven't invested in the infrastructure, and, because companies are still allowed to make things unrepairable, the designs make recovery challenging and expensive. If we had Extended Producer Responsibility and Right to Repair laws, recycled electronics would be a huge industry. There are BILLIONS of dollars of still useful critical metals and minerals in our landfills.

As others said, the energy to actually power ereaders is fairly negligible but the power supplying the data centers where those files live is increasingly problematic. Data centers and AI are directly driving the buildout of more fossil fuel power plants in the Southern US where I work on energy system community impacts.

I love the idea of sustainable design in printing. This plus actually decent POD could be so amazing for those of us who still love physical books.