How Green Is My Kindle?

I recently saw print books referred to as "dead tree books". Clearly the person was making the point that every book made of paper uses wood pulp, while an ebook theoretically uses none. Even though I am a monumental fan of my Kindle ebook reader, I had to respond that dead or not, those trees could be replaced. They are a renewable resource. The plastic used to make a Kindle or similar device is primarily a petroleum product, and petroleum is not renewable. When we use it all up, it will be gone. That got me thinking about the complex issue of what natural resources go into the creation of print and ebooks. It's not an easy thing to put together, least of all if you, like me, have little in the way of science education, but I will do my best.

This is meant as an objective analysis. As I say, I have my own reasons to love a Kindle.. it reads aloud to me, which I need. As soon as paper books start reading themselves aloud to me, I'll be back. In the meantime, I am just curious about the claim of environmental impact one way or the other.

Print books use lot more than just trees. Petroleum is a big component of their manufacture and transportation just like plastic products. Besides the petroleum used in cover art and manufacture and inks, the plants that produce the books use petroleum products. More than any other aspect of the publishing industry, transportation of books from the printing plant to distribution centers to stores uses vast amounts of petroleum.

How does this compare to, say, a Kindle 3 ereader? My Kindle weighs 8.5 ounces by far most of which is plastic. One source I found said that a plastic bottle is made from the amount of petroleum that would fill it a third of the way. The bottle itself, and in this case I am talking about a 16 ounce bottle in terms of volume it holds, uses about 13 grams of plastic. So that adds up to 13 grams of plastic being made out of a little over 5 ounces of petroleum. That's just less than 142 grams of petroleum. So if I understand this correctly, it takes ten times as much petroleum to make plastic.

So the Kindle sitting on my desk required at least 80 ounces of petroleum. It probably takes much more. Then there is the manufacture, the transportation, and the energy used to make it but also to power it. It is a low user of electricity so we can probably skip that per unit in the calculations.

Where the carbon footprint gets really tiny in terms of print book to Kindle ereader is in the area of the books themselves. Ebooks are not made of anything other than energy and a minuscule of that to boot. A Kindle can hold dozens and dozens of books. So it would be unfair to do a comparison of 1 print book to 1 ereader. You would have to compare literally hundreds of books, magazines and newspapers, not to mention documents, to a single publication made of paper.

Another aspect of print books versus ebooks is the fact that physical books must be shipped. Ebooks do not.

So, bearing in mind my calculations boil down to more of a conceptual equation than a technically accurate one, the 80 ounces of petroleum used in my Kindle is to be compared with hundreds of books, only one of which (like the Kindle) of which ever makes it out of the door of the printing plant.

Now, like I said, since I have to read with my ears, there is no comparison for me of print and ebook. Print books are wonderful.. I have hundreds of them. But they may as well not be there, since I cannot make use of a single one. No, not even picture books. But that rather colossal issue aside, I think the carbon footprint of an ebook is worth having more than one book to read.

Now.. calm down... I know there are libraries and all that. This was an intellectual exercise, and if anyone can offer more exact data, I hope you will share it. My own bottom line is choice. And that we all have.

The issues I raise above are far from the only issues of importance.  As Jim just pointed out, ebooks require a vast infrastructure even to exist.  But it's not cut and dried.  And it may ultimately be comparing apples and oranges.

So what do you think?

Things Amazon Could Do To Improve the Kindle's Accessibility

I adore my Kindle 3.  For the first time in about 35 years I can read books that came out recently, pretty much impossible if one is reliant on recorded books "for the blind". 

I believe Amazon is desirous of making the Kindle as accessible a tool as possible.  They have come a long way.  I would like to offer some recommendations of what they can do to improve it further.

• While I am less into the Amazon Storefront on the Kindle able to be read aloud, it being so much easier to buy books on the web site and have them sent to my device, it would be great if some of the tools, like notes, for example,  were also able to use text-to-speech.
• Improve the text-to-speech application the device uses.  I don't so much mean the tone or inflection as get rid of some of the pronunciation quirks.  My Kindle always reads "lunged"  with a hard "g" and the word "mar" as "march".  Granted, som of the presumptions are downright entertaining, like "a fox in a chicken cooperative",  but a little of that goes a long way.
• Put together something to give to publishers and authors who are reluctant to allow text-to-speech on their books that explains that no one who does not have to would choose to listen to the digital reader rather than buy the audiobook, and that disabling text-to-speech prevents people like me from reading their books.  I would be happy to back them up on this.
• Go back through some of the existing content, out of print books for example, and get them onto the Kindle.

I know blind people yell at you all the time.  Not me.  Your wonderful reading device has made a huge improvement in my reading life, my life in general, and I thank you.

Nan Hawthorne

Further Thoughts on Kindle 2's Text to Speech

See Kindle 2: Possible Drawback for Authors and Readers.

Having my Kindle 2 has been a great thing for me. It has opened up a huge selection of reading material that hitherto was outside my reach at least without a great deal of work and expenditure. Almost as important is that it allows me to be a consumer rather than a recipient of a government program, something that feels more dignified to me. Yes, the libraries for the blind are equivalent to any library, an institution I value and admire. But there is the feel of being done for and cosseted that we certainly will not get past for some time, I think, in our culture.

Ebooks and in particular Kindle 2 allows someone like me, an intellectual and overachiever, some independence and self sufficiency that I just could not have before.

So though obviously from my blog entry I understand authors who might not care to put their books on it because of the limitations of the test to speech, it also makes me sad that those books will be out of my reach for the most part. I tolerate the silliness of text to speech dictionaries because I'd rather do the mental adjustment than miss out altogether.

What I would love to see, given that the ancillary beneficiaries of the text to speech of the Kindle 2 are regarded as rather whiny demanding people and therefore not taken all that seriously as consumers, and to a degree understandably so, is authors and publishers coming forward to make their desires known about higher quality presentation of their work. I am not talking about your championing print impaired people. That;'s for us to do. I hope you will advocate rather for your work, for its optimal presentation. You deserve it. Your reward will be a wider readership.

So rather than dismissing this one outlet, think about speaking up not only as a consumer but as a producer of goods.

Let me just add that I recently, as many of you know, really battled to get independently published books taken seriously by my local library for the blind. They were out of hand rejecting indie books because of a bias that was not without some foundation. The result of my careful education is that this library, anyway, will look at an indie book and judge it uniquely when they choose whether to reproduce it in an accessible format. On its individual merits.

I hope I have brought indie authors and at least one of these libraries together. It seems like one of my quests in life is to get authors to make sure their books are available to the avid and hungry readers who are print impaired and those readers so they have access to "books outside the box".

Kindle is a stepping stone.

Kindle 2: A Possible Drawback for Authors and Their Readers

Getting your novel published on Kindle has lots of attractions. Let's face it, the more ways people can read it the better. The fact that the Kindle also has the "read aloud" feature makes the device not only accessible to people with print impairments, it basically turns a book into an audio book without paying narrators and sound studios.

Unfortunately one unfortunate fact has come to light. We already know that the average audio book reader, meaning the person, not the device, will not likely tolerate the mechanical nature of the text-to-speech voices. Print impaired people are used to it by now. While the books recorded by the National Library Services are professionally narrated, our various speech output applications have about as much resemblance to a human voice as any run-of-the-mill robot.Any authors worrying about the competing with their audio books can relax. It ain't gonna happen.

Now a new problem has come to.. well, not light, but definitely sound. While happily listening to Helen Hollick's splendid Sea Witch on my own Kindle I was dismayed by the pronunciation of the main characters' names: Jessamiah and Tiola. My computer reads them as jess-uh-MY-uh and TEE oh la. That's pretty close to what Hollick intended. But the Kindle 2 reads them as juh SAY me ack and SHY luh! Say what?

I contacted Amazon's Digital Rights people and asked whether the pronunciation of words in the Kindle's dictionary can be edited. The answer was no.

Now if I was as attached to one of my characters as I know Hollick is to Jessamiah (I am, but "Lawrence" and "Shannon" are easy to prounce) I would absolutely refuse to let his name get so mangled and would simply not put the book on the Kindle. This won't be an issue if you, as a novelist, don't care whether the people who prefer or have no choice other than to listen to books read yours. (If the latter is the case, then expect a withering look and n o review from me!) But my educated guess is that the Sea Witch series will never be on Kindle.

Whether the Kindle's makers have any clue about this limitation, I can't say. I personally believe that the "read aloud" feature on it was purely a gimmick to sell a new generation of Kindle. If that's what it is, then hey, I am happy to take advantage as I was with the first talking watches. But I'm with Hollick if, as a result, she never puts her books on their catalog.

Dude, my Book's on Kindle!

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'Nuff said.