January Daze: This, That, and Another Thing or Two

Aripeka Evening

Younger Sarah in a Warmer Season

No, we are not in Florida, but we were looking at old photos of winters past one recent Sunday morning, and the one seemed worth sharing again. We also looked at some cute old pictures of Sarah, and I took David on a virtual tour of my trip to Arizona last spring.

January seems to be a time for looking back, but for the present, please note winter hours at top right. New book orders will be taken through Saturdays of each week, with orders going on the following Monday in order to arrive by the end of that week.

Now, a few other timely topics in brief.

January Special at Bookstore

“This” is a special offer at Dog Ears Books, good for as long as supplies last. Buy our $9 book bag (the beautiful canvas one featured in the right-hand column) along with a $15 calendar (Leelanau Township scenes by Karen Casebeer, also over there on the right), and the price for the two items together, a $24 value,will be a bargain $20 + tax. Your calendar and bag will remind you on a daily basis of your local community and what every person means to its success, and you’ll feel good every time you use the bag and don’t have to take paper or plastic. I’ll have a different special in the month of February, so stay tuned. Because --

It's Winter—and (Almost) Everyone Wants Money

“That” is money, so if you don’t want to read this section, scroll down to the next.

People who don’t write letters don’t enjoy picking up mail, either, I’ve noticed. For them, an empty mailbox is good news: “No bills!” Having grown up in a letter-writing family, my heart is always light with hope as I turn the key to see what waits within, and often there is something delightful. Letters and cards and postcards from friends, along with seed catalogs, are always welcome, as are, my readers will recall, the little typed notes from that anonymous mystery poet, “H.” One Saturday morning I received a beautiful New Year’s card from one of my favorite publishers, who addressed me on the envelope as “The Excellent and Incomparable” and who included a handwritten personal note inside. That made my day! The next week there was a handwritten letter from a friend, and she had enclosed a tea bag, too, since we couldn’t be sitting down at a table together. My heart was warmed!

But most of what has filled the box lately has been mail from businesses and organizations looking for money. Everyone, it seems, has a hand outstretched. I don’t take the importuning personally. It can’t be personal, because if they knew my life at all they’d realize they’re barking up the wrong tree when looking to me for money in January.

Of course, it isn’t the “wrong tree” when it comes to bills. Bills must be paid. Phone bills, electric bills, sewer bills, tax bills, bookstore bills, credit card bills, propane bills, etcetera, etcetera. There are no medical bills in the mail because everyone from hospital to dentist now demands payment at time of service or beforehand, and there are no cable or “dish” bills because we opted out of television years ago, but there are still plenty of bills. More than enough.

What I call the “wrong tree” mail is that asking either for charitable donations or subscriptions or looking to me as a new customer for whatever product or service someone is trying to sell. Thank you, I made my December donations, and that’s all I can do for now, both because of the aforementioned pesky bills and because in our household we can’t seem to break the habit of regular meals. During most of the year, I make charitable donations in the form of memorials, as occasions arise.

I’ve renewed my subscription to Book Source Magazine and am a new subscriber to the London Review of Books, because they offered me a fabulous deal. New York Review of Books subscription has run out, but a friend and I will exchange London and New York, so we’ll both have the benefit of both. As for making a decision about health insurance based on advertising that comes in the mail, how foolish would I have to be? And people who want to sell me advertising or offer themselves as paid consultants to my business—sorry! Wrong tree!

A Couple Backward Glances at the Blog

As we sink into winter, a couple of my old posts bobbed up. They don’t appear on the all-time greatest hits of Books in Northport, but they’re things I enjoyed putting together, and a few readers either discovered or revisited them last week. The first addresses the question of the relation of “blogging” to “writing,” and that post engendered a pretty lively conversation when it first appeared. The other, on fiction, essays, criticism, etc., was in itself almost a review of a couple of books that gave me plenty of food for thought.

Where We’re Going, Will We Need Roads?

Ah, yes, you guessed it: I’m not thinking about roads but about the ever-uncertain future of printed books and actual, physical, “bricks-&-mortar” bookstores. Here’s a recent contribution to thoughts about it all. The writer says there is evidence that the disappearance of bookstores lowers the market demand even for e-books and means that fewer books will be read in any form. Once again, my mantra: I’m here now, I’m here now, I’m here now.... And isn’t “now” all we ever truly have?

January 2013: Sarah at edge of woods

"Holier-Than-Thou" Becomes "Greener-Than-Thou"

As a bookseller and a lifetime lover of the printed word who also takes earth stewardship seriously, I have thought and read a great deal on the subject of the environmental impacts of books in various formats. Sadly, most of what I read fails to present a full consideration of the relative costs of print versus electronic books. The scant half-page in the Winter 2013 issue of ForeWord magazine is, I’m sorry to say, hardly an exception to the usual run of superficial and incomplete additions to this vitally important discussion. I’ve written about this before, but the topic doesn’t go away, so here is a more current response to the specific recent article.

Aimee Jodoin’s “How Green Is Your Library?” gives a few figures for the carbon costs of printing books on paper. None are given for e-books (one is simply asked to assume that they are less), and there is no consideration of how long printed books last, let alone any acknowledgement whatsoever that books can be printed on anything other than paper. Anyone serious about this question cannot ignore William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. McDonough and Braungart’s thesis is that products can and should be designed for the life of their component materials, and physical copies of their book exemplify the feasibility of their thesis. Failure to take account of this way out of the dilemma presented so glibly in the popular press, when put forward in a magazine dedicated to books, is indefensible.

Jodoin states that “carbon emissions from both the production and use” of e-readers versus books makes the electronic devices “the more environmentally friendly choice for those who read more than 23 books per year.” This claim (others I’ve read put the figure at 100 books per year) is made despite “the typical lifespan of a year and a half” for an e-reader. I doubt very much that the skewed comparison takes the reading of used print books into account, but the omissions do not end there. No consideration is given to (a) the lifespan of a printed, bound book; (b) the number of readers any single printed book may serve in its lifetime; (c) rare minerals needed to produce electronic devices, along with political and working conditions in countries where these minerals must be obtained; or (d) the mountains of electronic waste generated by devices with a “typical lifespan of a year and a half,” to mention only obvious questions that come to mind without painstaking research. Signal towers? Privacy? Make up your own list of concerns and see how long it gets.

Yes, I am a retail bookseller, but I chose my work much more out of love and on principle than from any dream of riches. If I were ever to retire someday from bookselling, the future I see for myself as far as books is concerned is that of continuing to buy, borrow, and share printed books, both new ones and those that have been around the block a few times or have been loved and shared for a hundred years. If any of my paper books fall irretrievably to pieces, I’ll either keep the pieces for what they contain or tear up the pages to add to my compost pile.

An entire paper could be written on any of the points I raise here. Nevertheless, I hope I have made clear that I find the environmental case against print books inconclusive at best. At worse? Downright specious.

Okay, one last word here. Wouldn’t it be great if we human beings, the current dominant species on earth, could all work to keep our planet livable and beautiful without looking down on and dissing each other all the time? I confess that I was instantly put off simply by the title of the magazine article I’ve criticized here. You think you lead a green life? It seemed to sneer at me. You’re an old fogey, polluting the planet with your business and personal life full of old-fashioned books! So yes, I was instantly on the defensive.

And yes, I realize that newspapers and magazines—themselves print media, let us not forget; pot calling kettle black?—face tremendous fiscal challenges these days. Getting in readers’ faces and being controversial sells copies. In the war for readers, and in a time when reader attention span is diminishing (some say because more and more readers are scanning screens instead of taking in pages), an attention-getting headline is probably much more important than depth of treatment. I get all that.

I realize, too, that I am, in a sense, biting the hand that has fed me a few snacks, if not meals, because I’ve written a handful of paid reviews for the magazine in question. The publisher and editor are intelligent, hard-working, and charming people, women I call friends. I like and admire them very much, so make of that what you will. They have gone public with their point of view, and I am simply doing the same with mine. We’ve got a disagreement here, and intelligent people can disagree.

At the end of the day, after all, how any of us feels about anything is beside the point, because the degree of harm done to the earth we leave behind for succeeding generations will come not from how we felt, but from our actions and the consequences of those actions. So all greener-than-thou, one-upsmanship aside (here I picture the Paleolitic diet folks and the vegans carrying big signs, wearing printed t-shirts, and yelling at each other), what are the facts? It’s a serious question that deserves more than a few glib paragraphs.

No Purer Love

You needn't be rich to collect books. These are from the Peter Pauper Press.

A recent post and comments on Books in Northport (don't miss the comments!) focused on the effect of rising real estate values on urban bookstores, a topic raised by Andrew Laties. Everyone knows, however—and I mean everyone in this country, not just everyone in the business--that rent is only one of many concerns facing bricks-and-mortar booksellers, as those of us with a physical street presence are called. The rapidly changing environment of publishing and bookselling, including online publishing, online buying and selling, e-books, e-readers, “clouds” and all the rest, has got everyone guessing and no one knowing for sure which way to jump.

I’m not alone in my love for printed books, and I’m far from alone in having expressed the reasons I remain loyalty to the old form but today I want to take another look at e-books, from a different and narrower perspective, because while advocates for and defenders of their respective preferences have advanced arguments in the e-book vs. print book debate dealing with issues of convenience, cost (both personal and environmental), and readability, Tim Parks has turned the debate in a new direction. His claim, the one I want to examine, is that that e-book offers a purer literary experience.

Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names. It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting surrounding the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves. In this sense the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children’s books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups.

Leatherbound Jane Austen with ribbon bookmark

This is a serious point of view, and it cannot be dismissed out of hand. As for the obvious counter-argument in favor of what Parks calls “fetishistic gratification,” he anticipates and meets it head-on.

Weren’t there perhaps specific pleasures when reading on parchment scroll that we know nothing of and have lived happily without? Certainly there were those who lamented the loss of calligraphy when the printing press made type impersonal. There were some who believed that serious readers would always prefer serious books to be copied by hand.

Indeed, says Parks, until e-books came along, every age--with each successive “word-delivery system,” if you will--offered different sorts of “fetishistic gratification” (the former phrase in quotation marks is not one Parks uses; the latter is), and only now can we free ourselves from these physical distractions to meet literature in pure form. As I say, this is a serious argument, deserving of serious consideration. If you have the time and inclination, follow the link and read his position in full. It’s worth the time.

Not surprisingly, there was immediate reaction. One bookstore owner, Bill Petrocelli, predictably (but is “predictably” always “wrongly”?) challenged the Parks view, reminding readers that the fact that e-books don’t burn (a point Parks had made) is not necessarily in their favor. He was quoted in the trade e-newsletter "Shelf Awareness" as follows:

The e-book burners of the future won't have to round up all of the copies and put on them on a big pyre. They could achieve the same thing with the push of a button.

I am more than sympathetic to Petrocelli’s concern. I certainly don’t want my books somewhere in a “cloud,” where they can be turned off by some remote master switch at any moment. He has much more to say, also, which you can read here. All of Petrocelli’s are serious concerns. He does not, however, provide a direct answer to the purity question posed by Tim Parks, so let’s go back to that and then afterward see whether the two concerns can be addressed together or whether they cancel each other out. 

First, I want to question the alleged “purity” of the e-book reading experience, and secondly I want to examine the general desirability of “pure” experience, divorced from sensual considerations.

The look of this shelf pleases my aesthetic sense, but there's more--.

Does reading a book on an electronic device, be it cell phone, tablet, or large computer screen, deliver an experience free of “fetishistic gratification”? After all, I can’t be trying to impress people by the dust jacket on my book if it isn’t a book I’m holding and they can’t see a title. There’s no way interior decorating can come into play, either: the books I read (were I to read on an e-reader, which I don’t) cannot be lined up on shelves to impress visitors to my home. So is Tim Parks correct in saying that we have left the distracting sensual element behind with with the "austerity" of e-readers?

Reports from the e-reading public seem to suggest otherwise. A more “’paperlike’ reading experience” is touted as a plus for some models. People with e-readers are eager to talk about the quality of the lighted screen, the background color, the “smoothness” of use. Two owners of the devices have insisted on showing me "books I've read," which they did by showing me a a lineup of titled book icons on their electronic screens. (I'm not making that up. Somehow they seemed to think the icons provided more evidence than if they had simply told me, in spoken words, what they'd been reading.) E-readers do not dispense with fonts, either; they simply make it possible (as Parks admits) for the reader to adjust and alter the font at will.  And what about all those distracting extras like hyperlinks and such? Don’t those rather leave the “pure” text behind? Isn’t it a bit like watching a movie on DVD with the director’s voice talking over the dialogue in every scene as he explains how the scene was shot and how he got the actors to give the performances as they did? Is that a purer film experience? The question I’m asking here, in line with the argument made by Parks, isn’t whether or not you should want or enjoy the extras (because they're a bit like footnotes, after all, and you don't have to bother with them) but if the e-reading experience is “purer,” as he claims. 

Isn’t it obvious that the sensuous has not been eliminated from the e-reading experience but only homogenized so that each book’s reading “feel” is like the one before and the one to follow? Haven't a series and variety of objects simply been replaced with one sleek, modern one? What would it mean to eliminate all material objects from the reading experience? If you could somehow “download” a “book” (text, if you will) directly into your brain, would that be a “pure experience”? Maybe it would be. Maybe that is the dream that many hope will be realized in the future of reading. I wonder how many old-fashioned booklovers feel the desire for such an experience.

I’d like to change the subject slightly, for reasons of analogy. For many people, “meeting” strangers on the Internet is a freeing experience, precisely because they can meet mind to mind and leave distracting bodies out of the equation. One could, I suppose, make the argument that a relationship thus formed provides—or at least has the potential to provide--pure interpersonal experience. Individuals can exchange opinions without even knowing one another’s gender, much less their respective ages or other physical qualities. If an exchange of views is conducted in such a manner, does it constitute a relationship? A pure relationship? The literary experience, says Parks, is purely mental and exists “in the movement of the mind through a sequence of words from beginning to end.” Nothing else. Is the experience of love or friendship, in its purest form, nothing more than the meeting of two minds?

More than decor--time travel and encounters with those no longer among us.

Denigration of the material world is at least as old as Plato, who divided existence into two realms and saw earthly objects as degraded versions of pure heavenly forms. To my way of thinking, such disdain for our material world, the only one we know and the one that is, therefore, the ground of our every experience, is nothing short of reprehensible ingratitude. I love to see a smile on a friend’s face or to take a friend’s hand in sympathy.

Beautiful new paperback

Okay, Tim, I gave it a whirl. I considered your position. But I’m not buying it. I don’t believe the e-reader experience is purer than the experience of reading from printed books. It’s just different. And pure experience isn’t what I’m looking for, anyway. What I want is real experience. I don’t need or desire the illusion of having left the earth. In fact, the books I love most, whether fiction or nonfiction, bind me more tightly to this earth and to those I love by evoking earthly experience. And for that I love them, the books, both what they say and for how they look and feel. I don't love books because I sell them. I am a reader and a bookseller because I love books--as literature and as objects.

Two new hardcover novels with dust jackets--beautiful in every way!

If I Were a Luddite, Would I Be Blogging?

Someone else said it, so I don’t have to. It seems that kids who see parents reading bound, printed books see them as doing something different from reading on a screen. The kids respond differently, too. This does kind of shoot a hole in my poster idea: “READING IS NOT A SPECTATOR SPORT.” Maybe it is, after all.

But there are reasons to be online and good stuff to read, watch and listen to. For example, if you haven’t watched and listened to the Steve Jobs commencement speech video yet, get with it. How many videos do I watch online a year? Fewer than a dozen, I assure you, but this one is top of my recommendation list.

Getting back to books, though, here’s what absorbed me for an hour or two the other day:

Mary Wollstonecraft and Percy Bysshe Shelley married in 1816 after his first wife, Harriet, died a suicide by drowning. Percy and Harriet had been estranged for two years prior to her death, but Harriet’s suicide took place only after her husband had run away with the 17-year-old Mary.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is famous as the author of classic horror novel, Frankenstein, which appeared in 1818, subtitled The Modern Prometheus. In this story, faithful to the original, young Frankenstein steals not mere fire as in the Greek myth but life itself, cobbling together a monster from purloined body parts stolen from morgues and graveyards and bringing his creation to life with “galvanism” (which Webster’s defines as “a direct current of electricity esp. when produced by chemical action”). Everyone knows what became of Frankenstein’s monster. Here is the story as given in The Reader’s Encyclopedia, by William Rose Benet:

Longing for sympathy and shunned by everyone, the creature ultimately turns to evil and brings dreadful retribution on the student for usurping the Creator’s prerogative, finally destroying him.

But then in 1820 came Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, a drama in which Prometheus is released from the mountain where he was chained by Zeus as a punishment for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to human beings. Reunited with his true love, he is vindicated in having gone against Zeus, and a new Golden Age ensues. Down with the gods, up with the humans! seemed to be Shelley’s message. Quite a different message from that of the myth and of Mary’s story.

Following their marriage, Mary and Percy Shelley lost three infant children before having a daughter who survived. Mary suffered, understandably, from depression. Percy sought consolation with other women. The bloom was off the rose. Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned (an accident, apparently, rather than a suicide) in 1822 while still a young man. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley lived on until 1851.

What would either of them make of today’s experimentation with cloning and genetic engineering? In hindsight, what fate would they think Prometheus deserved? Did Mary come to wish Percy had felt himself more bound (to her), not quite so free to overthrow convention and tradition, once the shoe was on the other foot and the consequences come home to roost?

So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein—more, far more, will I achieve; treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.

Life in the Slow Lane and Books in Person

There's a lovely little trade periodical I've subscribed to now for about a year called Book Source Magazine. Published by a bookseller in Cazenovia, New York, with additional contributions from England and Australia, BSM is a periodical Charles Lamb could have appreciated. How quirky is it to publish a small print magazine about books these days? I love it! John Huckans also writes about gardening in his Notes and Comment section at the beginning of each issue. He’s going to try ranunculus this year, and I’m campaigning to sell him on hellebores.

But getting back to books, the May-June issue has an article by a bookseller in Melbourne, Australia, the proprietor of Alice's Bookshop in North Carlton, and this man, Anthony Marshall, has put so many of my own feelings into words that I'm half in love with him. For starters, he has pulled all his Internet listings offline and is "no longer an internet bookseller. It's over, finished, done with. And I am delighted." He cites the diminishing returns of income for time involved (my chief reason for pulling out of my own online listing service) and the tedium of processing online orders and inquiries, “cataloguing and tracking down and packing books...: the paper-work and the e-mail work, the answering of stupid or vexatious or footling questions from prospective customers." Yes, yes, yes! He goes on:

And who wants to come into a bookshop where the bookseller is hunched like a hobbit before a flickering monitor, absorbed in his freakish fantasy virtual world when he should be at his desk ready to welcome you, if not with open arms, at least with a smile or a nod of the head and perhaps a word of greeting?

Mr. Marshall describes what he calls in general a "slow bookshop" as one in which "books are stocked not primarily for their ranking in the best-seller list but for their intrinsic and lasting worth." He notes that the bookseller in a slow bookshop may sometimes be seen reading a book or writing a letter by hand, adding, "Not everyone has given up on pen and ink." Do I need to mention that he has no interest in e-books? Here is a bookseller on the other side of the world, in the other half of the seasonal year, who feels as I do about my professional life! While reading, I underlined so many sentences and paragraphs in the article that I finally had to sit down to write, in longhand, a letter to the magazine's publisher, because I too:

...know intuitively that there are legions of people still in the world ... who are committed to the slow search, who are not in a hurry, who relish browsing in real bookshops: people who do not want the quick fix always and the shortest path, or the lowest price, but are prepared to meander down by-ways and the side-tracks: to be seduced by the delights and dangers of serendipity. To wait and see.

A few years back, I happened to mention to a casual acquaintance that I longed for my own little Cajun accordion. “Look on Ebay,” the person suggested, a trifle impatient with what he saw as my thwarted desire. That wasn't it at all. I didn’t feel thwarted and wasn’t concerned with immediate gratification. “No, I want to enjoy wanting it for a while,” I tried to explain. Slow bookshop people understand the pleasures of wanting and searching, as well as the “delights of dangers of serendipity.” It isn't only about finding what they want but also about wanting what they find.

And don't you just love the way Anthony Marshall writes? "Hunched like a hobbit"! "The delights and dangers of serendipity"! Isn't this great stuff? And the attitudes he expresses, e.g., that "there is more to life than efficiency and other economic imperatives." Hear, hear!

I feel he is talking about me and Dog Ears Books, as well as about himself and Alice's Bookshop when he writes, "In my slow bookshop, I face my customers and engage with the world, with life." Aye, that we do, so prepare to slow down when you visit Dog Ears Books. It’s that kind of dangerous place!


Book Source Magazine is published bimonthly. The basic subscription rate is $20; library rate $24; Canada and Mexico $24; $40 overseas airmail. Subscription requests and other correspondence should be directed to Book Source Magazine, P.O. Box 567, Cazenovia, NY 13035. The publisher can also be contacted by telephone or e-mail, (315) 655-8499 or bsm at windstream dot com.

News from and of Michigan Writers

Word from Jerry Dennis, author of The Living Great Lakes; It’s Raining Frogs and Fishes, etc., is that his new work on the Great Lakes shoreline could be out in fall of 2011 or, possibly, not until sometime in 2012. An excerpt will appear before then, however, in Michigan Quarterly Review. And that reminds me to remind blog readers and bookstore customers that I still have copies of the MQJ issue with Benjamin Busch’s beautiful, moving and unforgettable essay, “Growth Rings.”

I contacted Jerry Dennis and got his news after a regular Dog Ears Books customer told me that he and his wife had enjoyed all the more a long road trip to Virginia because they passed the time reading aloud from The Living Great Lakes. Now these are people after my own heart! They read to each other!

Ellen Airgood is back in the U.P. after a trip to New York and meetings with her agent, editor, publisher and the marketing people who will be bringing her first published novel, South of Superior, to readers in the spring. Ellen is excited “to be doing what I’ve always wanted to do.” She also reports that “it was fascinating to watch the heart of the book business beating. It all happens at high speed, and constantly...,.” She asked if I could imagine it. No, I guess not, really. New York publishing is about as far from Northport as it is from Grand Marais--another world altogether.

Fans of Jim Harrison, former Leelanau resident, now of Montana and Arizona (the dust jacket information is incorrect), don’t have to wait until spring for a new book. The Etiquette of Freedom, conversations between Harrison and poet Gary Snyder, is available now, and even the poets’ dogs got into the act, as the photo section clearly shows. Because this book was first a documentary film, you get a DVD along with the hardcover, making it a pretty deal for $28.

Then there are the books you missed the first time around. One of my customers wanted Phil Caputo’s Indian Country, a novel set in the U.P., a request that brought to my attention the new paperback edition. Main character is a Vietnam veteran; the fictional landscape is geography I know and love, somewhat rearranged.

What’s it like here in the winter? Winter varies from year to year. This second week of December 2010 we have plenty of snow, with the wind to move it around. Need any snow where you are?

P.S. Sometimes, Mind on Topic // Dog on Bone (or Stick)


I can’t stop thinking about books, e-books, natural resources used and waste generated. Here is a whole list of sites looking at the question. A quick perusal revealed what I already suspected and wrote in my last post, i.e., that these comparisons are only between new hardcover books and new e-books. The most ecological option is still used print books, whenever available. Thinking of that, I can’t help wondering how many new hardcover books are bought and read by only one person. What do you think? If we compare readings to readings, rather than books to books, how does the LCA come out? The reading public needs this information!


This is the view from the bar at the Happy Hour. See my other blog for a more detailed look at the snowy exterior.

I Am Not a Luddite

I have been invited to so many conferences on "The Death of the Book" that I suspect it is very much alive.
- Robert Darnton, Harvard librarian

How can I claim here at "Books in Northport" to provide news from the world of books if I say nothing of this week’s announcement from Google that their e-books are going to be available in (some) independent bookstores? It’s big news! It’s the Clash of the Titans! (Or, as one of my husband’s art students said, memorably, years ago in class, “the clash of the Titians.”) After all, this news could change the whole book world, from publishing to reading.

I am not a Luddite (she said, somewhat defensively), and I do not oppose all change simply because it is change. There are lots of changes I would like to see, e.g., drivers in Leelanau County suddenly deciding to use their turn signals at each and every appropriate opportunity. (Get a clue, folks! Signaling turns is not just a concept!) But I have serious questions about e-books and e-readers, beyond the accessibility of texts. Since environmental impact is a big question for me, I set out to look for some answers about how e-books and printed books compare in this regard and found a complex landscape to be surveyed.

This first site I looked at gives statistics for energy used in producing and transporting books vs. energy used reading an e-book, but I could not tell whether the energy to produce the e-reader was included, and I noted that this blog includes links to the online giant selling the e-reader the blogger uses. Conflict of interest? I also noted that the comparison was made strictly with new books--used books are not discussed--and that the blogger opens by talking about how bookstores have to over-order (hardly the case at Dog Ears!) and return books which may be pulped. Comparison of waste and recycling issues were not, however, gone into in depth.

The next online article I read might well be suspected to contain conflict of interest, since it appears under the aegis of the Independent Book Publishers Association, a group with a vested interest in continuing to sell books. To my surprise and delight, the beginning of the article promised a life cycle analysis (LCA) to make energy comparisons between the two kinds of reading packages. Unfortunately, the writer couldn’t come up with a lot of hard numbers because manufacturers of e-readers, with the exception of Apple, refused to provide information. I’m not going to try to summarize this article but would love to have other people read it and give me some feedback. What do you think?

Steven Levingston, in an article in the Washington Post, also writes of the difficulty of making the comparison but in the end relies on an analysis made by Daniel Goleman, who measured units like gallons of water used, kilowatts of energy required and adverse health effects. (This is not an all-inclusive list.)

Goleman’s rule of thumb: You must read 100 books on your e-reader for the environmental costs to break even. If an e-reader is upgraded before those 100 books are read, the environmental impacts will multiply.

You can read Daniel Goleman’s entire article here. His LCA includes materials used, energy required in manufacturing, transportation and reading, and disposal issues.

Finally, I skimmed quickly through an article claiming that printed books are faster to read than e-books. Comments left on the site by other readers criticized the original question, as well as sample size, and I realized I didn’t care much about which way of reading was faster. I’m a slow reader myself, and I appreciate slow books. How long did it take an author to write a book? Isn’t it worth more than four hours to read it?

Full disclosure: I am a bookseller as well as a reader, and while last year (2009) I read 102 books, the vast majority of them were used. We brought ten cartons of used books home from our winter in the South, books destined for resale at Dog Ears Books, but many others I read in Florida came from the library. I did buy one new book as a gift for a friend, and if I were in a higher income bracket, I would undoubtedly buy more new books, but it only makes sense to buy new selectively when there are so many used books available in readable or better condition. How does reading like mine affect the LCA of printed books?

David, when I was telling him what I was writing in this post, explicitly brought up the question of how many people will read any given printed book—not a book of the same title, but one physical book--in that book’s lifetime, and it occurs to me now that a more apt comparison would not hold books and e-books up side by side but would focus on readings. Each e-book reading will be singular, while the multiplying effect of printed books will reduce their energy requirements for each successive reading. Or—have all the costs been figured into the first reading, making subsequent readings zero impact? This question needs to be answered before any serious discussion of comparative environmental costs can get underway.

There are a couple of other issues having to do with how costs of printed books can be cut in future:

(1) Materials: Several comparisons between e-books and print books remarked on how using “fewer” trees from “sustainably managed forests” (i.e., industrial woodlots) will reduce the environmental impact of printed books. That’s true enough as far as it goes, but here’s a reminder from the Cradle to Cradle folks (see my Dec. 8 post): Books don’t have to be printed on chemically bleached paper! CtC was printed on a high-grade, recyclable kind of “plastic,” not the kind that can only be downcycled—once--into ugly and not very durable lawn furniture but a kind that can be used as “paper” over and over and over again.

(2) Publishing, distribution and sales: I am an advocate for the abolition of returns. If booksellers, either online or in a bricks-and-mortar store (as they’re called), could no longer return books, they would be much more careful and conservative in their ordering. A no-returns policy would result in more careful and conservative print runs, which in turn would be better for publishers and distributors, who would be able to count on books sold as books sold. It would also help small booksellers by leveling the playing field. As the business works now, giant retailers can order huge numbers of books for deeper discounts than small retailers get, but if those books don’t sell, they can be returned to the distributor, in turn sent back to the publisher, remaindered or pulped, generating a lot of unnecessary transportation, accounting headaches, business uncertainty and disposal worries.

Imagine what these two differences alone could mean for the future of printed books!

Here’s my bottom line: There’s no way to avoid using energy either to print books or manufacture e-readers, to transport books or to transport e-readers, and disposal issues crop up in both cases, as well, so why would I elect to read in a format that requires additional inputs of energy? Why not just take my book out under a tree or to the beach or read it on the front porch or under the lamp that’s turned on in the winter evening, anyway, so I won’t be tripping over my dog when I get up from my chair to go to bed?

It will be a while before all the dust from the new e-reader revolution settles, and the final settling may not come in my lifetime. Meanwhile, I’m watching the dust storm with interest and sticking with my old-fashioned books. As the Water Rat said of his old riverbank. “It’s my world, and I don’t want any other.”

About that Luddite business? I do have enough Luddite in me to prefer jobs to unemployment and recyclable materials over toxic waste.