Reader’s Corner

I had a chance to travel recently, after a long travel hiatus, and was amazed at how prevalent the reading devices were—on planes, in airports, train stations, restaurants. Devices are different, it seems to me, but still deliver ideas and images and emotions to the reader.

1. Excellent for reading of all kinds of material. 2. Excellent for the environment. 3. Nothing is the “end” of anything, other than species extinction. Hyperbole is the second-to-last refuge of scoundrels.

I have hopes for social media even if I don’t really participate in it much…the interactivty puts solo reading in another category…those who don’t resort to idiotic i-just-fed-my-cat messages put out great stuff…and it compacts and whirls…blows the four walls of our solitude apart…how to be thoughtful on the wing is the challenge of the fleeting moment…and information of course is not poetry, so what are people reading?  sometimes I don’t want to know any more about it, all that data streaming…Robert Bly from his new “Reaching Out to the World” new prose poems:  ...we love this body as we love the day we first met the person who led us away from this world, as we love the gift we gave one morning on impulse, in a fraction of a second, that we still see every day, as we love the human face, fresh after love-making, more full of joy than a wagonload of hay…..

what leads us away from the world?—that can also bring us back reinvigorated…  what technology is best (printed books are of course a technology)?  and what is the content….

Social reading—an interesting concept, though I’m not sure I would enjoy it personally. I’ve seen applications that would allow me to read a book, make notes, share those notes with others reading the same book, and read their notes too. With appropriate noise filters, it might make for a terrific dispersed book club.

I’m with Martin, above: “the end” of reading is not nigh. How we read is changing, is all.

For all their ubiquity and ease of use, e-readers are not as environmentally benign as we might wish.  In fact, life-cycle studies of e-readers have shown that their environmental impact is greater than books—despite the destruction of trees for paper.  When we take into account the materials extraction, carbon footprint of manufacture and shipping, byproducts, energy required by server farms, and the planned obsolescence of e-readers, paper books come out ahead. I compiled some info and sources in this blog post: http://wp.me/pMG68-L.  The links provided there are also useful.

Good points, Tracy. Since e-readers are bought primarily by the heaviest readers, I sort of hoped that volume (100+ books) would make up for the resources. But you make good points about why that may not be so

All these tradeoffs! Some books represent 5 gallons of water and 4-5 pounds of carbon, and often one book is discarded for every one sold.

But it’s a fine day so I’ll take your advice and walk to the library…

I agree, Scott.  The trade-offs are so tough to figure out, so hard to make.  Sometimes, I think I should just sit quietly and not consume anything for the rest of my life.

Those are good points you make Tracy, but I don’t think they are the end of the story.
In much current discussion, there is this tendency to accept the facile “Freakonomics” kind of “explanations.” Do the numbers in the articles of energy consumption account for all effects? By cutting out one whole side of the manufacturing and distribution process, I thought there was some real savings, but your points and links are good skepticism. To reduce clutter, and to allow me to get pdf files and read on-line essays, I still think the cheap Sony e-reader is a major improvement.

Lastly, what matters is the actions of the whole of humanity, not little pockets of resistance. Nature is not going to hand us a little prize corner of pristine woods for being simplicity icons - it is going to generate its responses from the cumulative effects of all our actions, and there is no way out of our devastating collective trajectory.