A recent study found that the Amazon Kindle ebook reader recoups its carbon footprint after one year of use and averages carbon savings equivalent to the manufacture of 22.5 paper books for each subsequent year. Given the devastating carbon footprint of the publishing industry, ebooks are emerging as a greener reading alternative, from private consumers to public education.
To encourage more people to join the electronic reading revolution, here’s the lowdown on where to buy your ebooks.
It’s hard to find a better price than free, and the Web is teeming with free ebooks, you just might not care to read most of them, as most are obscure or self-published. To read something you’ve heard of before, try Project Gutenberg, which digitizes classic literature and academic texts that have aged into the public domain. You won’t find any New York Times Bestsellers here, but if you feel like revisiting Dracula, Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice or the rest of your high school required reading, you’re in luck.
Adobe Digital Editions offers a similar selection at no cost when you download the free Adobe Digital Reader, which organizes your ebook library.
At Amazon.com’s Kindle store, ebooks average around $10 each, which is about the same cost as a paperback copy. Kindle books used to be available only for the Kindle reader (and its subsequent incarnations), but are now available for iPhone, iPod Touch and PCs.
This widening of the market is likely a result of Google entering the ebooks game with its open source software. Google expects to launch Google Editions in the first half of 2010, but no word yet on what the prices will be like.
Until Google threw its hat in the ring, Sony was Amazon’s main competitor in the ebook market, with the Sony Reader and its own ebook store. But in a five-book comparison, I found lower prices at Amazon.com four times, and the one time Sony bested the competition, it was by only five cents.
Book leviathan Barnes and Noble also offers ebooks through its Web site, but prices aren’t consistently higher or lower than Amazon. For the same five books, Barnes and Noble offered the highest price twice, the lowest price once and fell in the middle on the other two.
When taking all the options into consideration, the price difference between companies is only a couple of dollars. Perhaps, then, it would be better to evaluate where you get your ebooks from based on each company’s environmental efforts. Do you want to support a company that also sells thousands of paper books, a company that manufactures electronics or a company that dominates the internet? That’s for you to decide... but these links to Google's, Amazon's and Sony's green policies might help!
Source: BecauseAction.com
