Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost" data-source="post: 5028179" data-attributes="member: 4720">I am learning a shocking amount about mining practice as a result of this.It would be fun if it wasn't so depressing.I will concede readily and happily that mining is screwed up to Hades and back, probably more so than paper.  We probably need to rein in both, but as a consumer of limited means, it's easier for me, personally, to cut down on my paper use (which can be substantial) than my heavy metal use, which is honestly nearly non-existent outside the laboratory, where I am properly constrained on my disposal.  I only upgrade my computer about every 5 years, for example, and I'm darn careful about what I do with my computer parts.  There are good recyclers and bad recyclers for that stuff, to be sure.The nice thing about being too poor to be an early adopter is that I'll wait until the e-reader situation is settled enough that I can buy one device and have it last for years and years.  I also won't adopt unless the file formats are made reasonably portable across systems and most books I want or need are usable on those platforms.  As an academic, that means textbooks, and luckily <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/business/06novel.html?emc=eta1" target="_blank">the likely sort of device</a> for such a thing would also be ideal for gaming books, IMO.Ultimately, even with how scary mining is, I think buying one e-ink/e-reader device every 10+ years will have less environmental footprint than buying and using samples of all the books and textbooks that I'm forced to deal with.  And for college students.... it's not even a question.  With what is needed to equip the average college student in textbooks for 4 years (leastways in biology, where I have the most experience).... getting an e-reader that can handle textbooks would almost certainly have less total impact.  If they actually removed the printing costs from the pricing equation, it would become massively cheaper, as well.</blockquote>

Verification