Book Lovers, Carbon Footprints, and Moral Dilemmas

Among editors, agents, writers, and others associated in one form or another with the publishing industry, you can’t have a conversation or open a industry journal or blog post without encountering the varying debates on what e-books will do (are doing) to transform the medium of how reading materials are presented to the consumer. Every sort of argument is posted, from the economic impacts, the contractual language of book deals, the future for publishing houses, the role of gatekeepers, to the very structures and contents of books themselves. Forgetting aesthetics, personal preferences, individual fondness (the heft of a good book, the pace of turning real pages, the portability, the possession of a library built over years and years of reading…), e-book technology is here, it is growing exponentially, and it is quickly gaining real aficionados among serious readers and techies alike. For the first time in its history Amazon reported that last month the sales of e-book titles surpassed sales of physical books. According to Eco-Libris, e-reader sales saw a 176.8% increase in 2009. The world moves on. E-books will continue to become a growing presence in the publishing marketplace and likely will one day dominate book sales.


One question often lost in the debates among industry insiders is whether this explosion of e-books is good for the environment. The more studies one reads, the more unclear the answer often is, due in large part to most all of the voices weighing in on such debates having vested interests one way or another on the answer. (In the spirit of disclosure, I must reveal my own interests here, for as a writer, the price-per-item of initial e-book titles vs. physical books will almost certainly reduce my future earnings significantly should e-books outpace physical books.) While likely imperfect, a study put out by the Cleantech Group would seem to indicate that e-books can have substantial positive environmental impact. Their study finds that the carbon footprint of an e-reader (factoring in manufacture, energy use, delivery to consumer, raw materials, etc.) is equivalent to that of 22.5 physical books (which do not use vast quantities of paper but have extremely high transportation costs). There is a good deal of statistical data to weigh through in the full report and a good deal of base point assumptions about the reading habits of those who own e-readers, etc. but their initial findings seem to be generally corroborated elsewhere. Whatever may happen in the commercial market, and we probably would be guilty of mimicking ostriches if we don’t see the inevitability of this growth, e-books hold tremendous economic and environmental savings in large niche markets such as college textbooks (removing the paper waste associated with multiple editions with minimal changes) and medical texts, among others.



What we can know is that the traditional publishing industry hasn’t exactly been environmentally conscious, and only in recent years have major publishing houses made much of any push to increase their use of recycled paper. Even among those publishers who have made such commitments, we’re still talking about 25 – 30% recycled paper usage at best. Estimates vary, but even towards the conservative side, the book publishing industry alone is responsible for the harvest of 30 million trees annually (and this grows explosively once the newspaper and magazine publishers are added).


More hard evidence is needed, for the manufacturers of e-readers aren’t exactly forthcoming on all the component materials that go into the construction of their devices and the environmental impact of those materials. Debates continue; a good beginning place for further investigation is present at Eco-Libris (an organization with its own vested interests we must note) that offers links to a number of related articles about environmental sustainability and carbon footprints in traditional and in electronic publishing. As an aside, I will point out that Eco-Libris may be an organization lovers of physical books want to support, for their mission is to provide readers with easy means to plant trees to offset the physical books they own.


Like most issues, this one gets really complicated, and almost no scenarios for the future seem to bode well for local, independent booksellers or community libraries, to say nothing of emphasizing the quality of book content or the development of a serious literature. At the very least, it is my hope that consumers will become educated such that one of the leading questions they ask as they contemplate the purchase of a product or their participation in an industry is focused on the environmental impact of that decision. If the demographics among frequent book purchasers hold up and we are looking at consumers who tend to be highly educated, frequently urban, and typically upwardly mobile, the trickle-down effect of becoming environmentally educated consumers becomes even more critical. In a consumer culture, like it or not, where we spend our dollars matters a great deal. Our culture needs books. We need good books. And we need intelligent, curious readers. The medium by which we get those good books may mean a great deal to our collective future as well.

(This post also appears on last Wednesday's blog over at Earthstorys.org.)

Seeing Vs. Thinking Part 2

I don’t wish to be misunderstood and have it believed that I don’t believe thinking is important. Quite the opposite. Indeed, part of the potency of writing is that writing offers organized thinking. The finished writing product is carefully constructed, ordered. It is architecture with engineering. What I do wish to distinguish is where and when that kind of formalized thought process occurs. As the cliché suggests, most of writing is re-writing. Revision takes a great deal of concentrated thought. Much of the work of revision is identifying relationships, ordering ideas, pursuing patterns, developing a cohesive, forward-moving, engineered text, only one where the reader can’t quite see all the elements of structural support. But you must provide the ideas legs and means of expression. You must have text first, and I am firmly convinced that over thinking a text before you have the raw materials will keep you from ever producing much of anything. It doesn’t necessarily take much to start or to move deeper within a text, not much more than the ability to see an image or a scene, although this does mean releasing control to the text rather than to the logical mind. That comes later and is equally vital.


We need writers who are clear thinkers. We need writers with ideas, not fluff. For me, the roots of texts exist in such vaguely formed and murky ideas that I must start with images or a character’s or narrator’s voice or a circumstance. It is THROUGH the writing that the ideas begin to clarify and take shape.

Word Temple

This reminder from the press stamp of Copper Canyon Press:  the Chinese symbol for poetry, when broken into its parts, are word and temple.

Seeing Text Vs. Thinking Text

I find that among the greatest writing dangers for me is to outthink a work in progress. When I catch myself trying to answer questions about a character, about that character’s motivations or thought processes, I get in trouble. Instead I must see. I must see an image, however incomplete, or a scene, or a character in action, or I must hear characters speaking. I only need shadows to write. Once I can see shadowy silhouettes, I can proceed, find the full scene, convey the moment or frozen image for which I have vision, and then, typically, doing so will allow me to see what I must see next or to power through a whole scene or even a chapter without too much thought. It is the translation of seeing through the vessel of the pen that matters, for the pen delivers the language on to the page. Once written, there remains a lot of work to be done, a great deal of development and revision and finessing, but as I then look back to move forward, I realize the logical questions now have answers. I don’t have to ask so many questions now for the people have stepped nearer to becoming whole and can supply the answers. For me, this is one of the great ironies about writing, for I am convinced that writing is about real clarity of thought and I pride myself on producing texts that develop ideas, but the only way forward into those ideas for me is not thinking too much. It is a matter of trust: trust in the self, trust in the medium, trust in the characters, and trust in the nature of the human story.

On Trying to Write

Today I have arrived at the study seeking morning sunshine, warmth on my skin, natural air, space and time to allow the expansion of stories and ideas that clutter the page and clutter the mind. So I step out onto the little deck that opens from the study. There is birdsong and slanted light accenting the intricate fibers of spider webs. The mosquitoes are put to bed. The day will be warm but the night still lingers in the air.

I seek quiet and find it, seek words and stumble. The quiet helps me find footing. Scrambling to locate toeholds, I jump from a muddled manuscript in progress to a muddled journal. I switch pens. I stare at the horizon. I watch birds in flight. It is easier to turn to the volume of Ted Kooser I have carried through the French doors, easier to venture into his Iowa farmyards than to locate the elusive figures emerging from the shadows of my pen. Easier as well than face the inevitable shadows of memory or the silhouettes that extend into those unknown places of a thousand tomorrows or the equally unknown of the book unwritten. The faces in Kooser are familiar but not mine. The birds we share, or at least many of them. His words are lovelier, his images more honed, but it is language I need. Language and memory and metaphor and idea, and mixing with the sunlight he helps ease me into this dark world of my own making, this density of inky pages and monochrome figures needing to become flesh.

Guest Blogging at Earthstorys

Okay, so it's been forever since I've posted on my own blog, so who am I to be trusted?  Despite my absence here for June, I'm now guest blogging every Wednesday at Earthstorys.  Please visit the site, not because I'm blogging there, but because it is an excellent hub for sustainability culture, one loaded with information and insight, containing a daily blog, feature ideas, news articles, an almanac--all things Earth.  Learn more about farm cooperatives, solar technologies, updates on the Gulf crisis and much more.