Newspapers have about another ten years, magazines another five or ten years after that. But I think there'll be books for a very long time.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

So what you are telling me is that all the CO2 a tree consumes in its lifetime is stored within it? I didn't know that... I guess you learn something new every day.

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The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.

Arthur C. Clarke

The Brain Science Podcast

It's only carbon bound in the tree as wood that's removed from the atmosphere and at that, only temporarily until it's released again when that wood burns or rots.

You started talking CO₂ reduction, then segued on to trees as CO₂ consumers, so I assumed you where talking about the part of CO₂ consumption that temporarily removes CO₂ from the atmosphere by binding the carbon as wood and was ignoring the much larger part that's exhaled again during the night.

Trees doesn't magically remove CO₂, though non-scientific greens seem to believe they do.
As an example old, stable, non-logged forests are CO₂ neutral, they don't have any influence on atmospheric CO₂, as there's a balance between how much is grown and how much is eaten and rots away¹.

1) Slight oversimplification as there's a small amount of sequestering from charcoal after forest fires, as charcoal doesn't rot.

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And the "driving on the freeway on a scooter" analogy still holds true because the pilots are sitting in 7 to 30 ton aircraft o' doom and you are running around them in your very own Meatbody, Mark I. Beep, beep.
Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

I have a wall of books myself, plus an additional closet, and multiple boxes in storage. I, very simply, love books. I rarely watch television and I prefer to read, by a long shot. However, I can see that printed material will not be produced in anything like the volume it is today.

We have grown up with books, and we have learned to love them for what they give us. We like the attributes of books because we first started loving the information that is transmitted and became connoisseurs of a sort. I know this because I feel something when I pick up a blank book, but it isn't anywhere near what I feel about a book with information in it.

It will only take a generation of children schooled with electronic books before printed material will be seen as obsolete. What student in their right mind would carry around textbooks when a millimeter sheet of plastic will suffice? Kids won't even begin to comprehend what our attachment to books is. That smell you love, they will find offensive. The dust, the dirt, the mildew, the yellowed pages, the markings you can't remove, all will be things they dislike. Most of all they won't like the mass.

I have always hated moving because my books easily equal the weight of my remaining belongings. I have had friends get mad at me during moves because they hauled ridiculous numbers of heavy boxes of books.

I imagine the people who liked clay tablets were horrified at the flimsy fragile alternative found in paper, but paper was more practical and clay tablet libraries went the way of the dinosaur. There are still clay tablets around, and I wouldn't be surprised if they are still being produced. But we aren't attached to clay tablets and I doubt our ancestors will see printed books any differently.

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The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.

Arthur C. Clarke

The Brain Science Podcast

Yea... I suppose that makes sense. I guess I never really thought about it. Trees aren't exactly part of the food chain unless you consider all the bugs and bacteria that munch on them as they decay, and the material that's left over acting as fertilizer for new plants. I suppose the carbon used in those processes is far less than the carbon that happens to hook up with oxygen and float away. I would have thought that large amounts of carbon dioxide would be released by forest fires but I wasn't aware that trees rotted away most of their carbon as CO2.

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The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.

Arthur C. Clarke

The Brain Science Podcast

On the other hand, if the library of Alexandria had been made out of clay tablets, fire would have not really been that big a deal. I see a difference however between comparing clay tablets, and papyrus scrolls, and paper books and e-books. An e-book requires electricity to run, even if just to turn the pages. Books work in all conditions, except darkness and underwater, disadvantages shared by presently available e-books, if they work in darkness, they are hell on batteries. I don't have to wait for a book to load, and while searching can be unwieldy,if it is a good book, you won't mind only finding the general location. Books can with proper care last centuries, and can provide enjoyment for many generations. Also, books smell nice.

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In my experience, the term "ebook" usually refers to a formatted file containing the text and graphics of a book. I generally use a PDA or a laptop to read ebooks, but there have been some tries at specialized ebook readers. I've still not seen a specialized reader that I'd bother with, though I do think they're on the right track with E-ink. It's true that ebooks and books aren't the same thing, but that's not a mark against ebooks. Rather, I think that both have their place, and each has advantages and disadvantages.

Sure, a wall of books can look nice. But when you have several walls double stacked, and plenty more books in boxes, and piles of books that occasionally tip over, it's not so great. I like books, and I'm not giving them up, but I'd love to have good ebook equivalents of all my existing books.

In reading a couple of comments on this thread it occurred to me that I've never read a book in a tub, and I realized there are at least three reasons: (1) I rarely use a tub, (2) for most of my life, I had to wear glasses to read and (3) I would never take the chance of getting a book wet. I just won't do that to a book. Also, I rarely put notes in the margin. I would do that occasionally for text books, but that's about it - marking up a book always feels somewhat sacrilegious to me. By the way, notes and highlighting are features with some of the ebook formats.

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

Through work I have access to an unbelievable number of current engineering books of all kinds, but they are only available online. I can select any book I want and read it. I can read any of them whenever I please. But I rarely use the service because I hate reading books on my computer. I would much rather have all those books sitting in my home. However, if I had that one millimeter sheet of plastic, and had access to all those books, you'd be hard-pressed to find me without my nose glued to a sheet of plastic.

The library that is available through this service is incredible. The library would not be anywhere near as accessible to myself and all my co-workers if they were printed books stored at the office. In fact, the company wouldn't bother getting 90% of the titles. But via this wonderful electronic library I have access to all that incredible information. I'm sure you can see that this is a valuable resource. It wouldn't be possible if the books weren't in electronic form. Resources like this will most likely become more popular and electronic book readers will be commonplace.

Another advantage is that no book is ever lost because it went out of print. Every book ever written can be stored and duplicated and nothing is lost. Our ability to store all that information will probably outstrip the rate at which it is produced, so preserving all of it shouldn't be a problem.

I'll be very sad when I can't go to Border's and browse because the chain ends up making more money off the coffee shop than the books, but as I mentioned before, kids won't bother with books, and when they become the majority consumers we'll be creaking our rocking chairs looking at our smelly crumbling yellow-paged novels and the kids will think we're nuts.

When is the last time you hand wrote a letter? My hand gets sore when I write a fraction of what I used to write. I write on whiteboards more than I do on paper. I use pens to sign my signature. If I write a check, which is becoming ever more rare, it is generally the most writing I will do all day. In fact, sometimes it's the most writing I will have done in a week. I take notes once in a while, but those are a pain because I have to transfer them to my computer. It's easier to just type the stuff into the computer first. There are still some situations where pen and paper are easier than lugging around a laptop, but not many.

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The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.

Arthur C. Clarke

The Brain Science Podcast

I take an awful lot of baths, actually, because of the pain. I don't like taking painkillers, and when it's a purely muscle problem, the bath will help. Sometimes, it'll even help joint pain. I can't fathom spending as much time as I do in one without somthing to do.

I don't write in books, either, with the exception of inscriptions in books I'm giving as gifts, and not even that very often. The only book that I personally own that has any of my own writing in it (at least that I acquired since about kindergarten) is my complete works of Shakespeare, because I was performing a scene from it in high school. But there are no notes even in my textbooks.

Then again, up here, there's always the chance that you'll get your book wet. I've been caught in downpours so severe that the bag I was carrying soaked through completely. That's wetter than any book I've ever read in the bath got.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Funny, I am reading The History of the Ancient World, by Susan Wise Bauer, and in the chapter discussing the first couple of dynasties of Egypt, she remarked that when they changed from clay tablets to papyrus, that was the first instance of technology coming back to bite us in the butt. The papyrus, of course, didn't endure like the clay tablets and we thus know a bit less about the later dynasties than we might have. Good book, by the way.

As to the OT, I subscribed to SciAm for a long while but gradually lost interest as they moved towards more articles on science I wasn't particularly interested in. Science News also found its way into my mailbox. Not sure why I discontinued that but I do like the publication. I think if I was to resubscribe to a scientific print publication, it would be that one. Never cared much for Discover.

I don't know about the other science magazines, but SA not only puts all of their stuff online now for access with paid accounts as a supplement/alternative to the paper publication, but also publishes some things exclusively online. You can't get them on paper except by downloading and printing. Anything you have electronic access to and want on paper, you can print (and it isn't very costly if your home printer is a small cheap B&W laser printer instead of an inkscam printer). Getting things on paper into electronic form is much more trouble.

Reading in the tub is not a difference between paper and electronic media. They both need to be kept up out of the water, so if you're fine with that for the heavier one, you can certainly do it for the lighter one.

Trees are a carbon reservoir. Yes, sooner or later they die and the carbon comes back out, but, in a forest, at any given time, there's a lot more carbon tied up in live ones (and not-fully-decayed ones and other organisms that took their carbon already in solid/liquid forms) that would otherwise be in the air at that moment. The fact that they're carbon-neutral, with the same amounts overall flowing into and out of them so they'd merely stabilize the atmospheric content at some level instead of constantly reducing it, does not change the fact that that stable level would be lower than without them because the flip-side of that carbon neutrality is that they also maintain a roughly constant amount of solid/liquid carbon (which is kept out of the air for as long as it's in the trees, and which is gained by growth as quickly as it's lost by death).

See, me, too. I think I would love to have my books in an electronic format as well as the paper format - but I would hate to have them in electronic format instead of paper. And I can't afford to buy books twice.

Give me a code to download an electronic copy for free when I buy the hardcopy and I'd be all over one of those Amazon kindles or something. Otherwise, no dice.

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SeanF

"Ask to understand, but don't challenge unless you have the knowledge."--NEOWatcher

The contents of this post are ©2008 by SeanF and may not be copied or retransmitted in any form without the express written consent of SeanF

Sci Am and Discover. Usually only when travelling, though, as Wikipedia is free and at my fingertips 24/7.

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I am Mugs, of the Alien clan of Usa, Nordamerica, a Terran, of Sol. Human.

Whoever says "perception is reality" is daft. It's merely an abstraction, and often not a very good one.

Science News does likewise.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Not quite true. Over time, forests (especially swampy ones) do continually remove the CO2, and eventually become coal.

Until we mine it and burn it...

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I am Mugs, of the Alien clan of Usa, Nordamerica, a Terran, of Sol. Human.

Whoever says "perception is reality" is daft. It's merely an abstraction, and often not a very good one.

And there is probably a huge difference between trees getting old, dying and falling down in a forest and going in and cutting all the trees down. Even with reforestation I wonder if the young newly planted trees consume anywhere near the same amount of carbon as mature trees. How much of the carbon is transfered into the soil when leaves fall? Or does that carbon all waft away like all the carbon in the tree as was stated?

I also wonder if CO2 is released by books as they age. What happens to them when they hit the landfills? My guess is that MOST books end up in landfills and a small percentage are preserved. Certainly most newspapers and magazines end up in the trash. Perhaps now with recycling we're doing a better job of reusing the material. I don't have any statistics that would show how much paper is retained in the system by recycling and how much is lost.

Are we really doing the world a favor by cutting down trees and storing carbon in the form of books?

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The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.

Arthur C. Clarke

The Brain Science Podcast