E-Ink Support

Earlier this week I read something that made me, like many of you a long-time lover of print, yearn to see books abolished in favor of electronic ink media like the Sony Reader and Amazon's Kindle.
(It turns out the below is crap, though I'm quoting the magazine accurately. Read a comment below. Bottom line: It's one book per seat. I should have checked further but didn't think of checking Robert's own Web site. A lesson learned.)
It is this, from The New Yorker's June 22 profile of Nora Roberts, the romance writer: "There are enough Nora Roberts books in print to fill Giants Stadium four thousand times."

Not four times, not 400 times, but 4,000 times. And not cover, but fill. The writer was trying to give readers a concrete image of the huge numbers of Roberts' books in existence, but in my case I had to back up and read the sentence again, then once more, and I still can't quite picture it. I mean, take just one seat in the stadium and stack Nora Roberts books on it. How many feet high would that stack of two or three books have to be to show the amount of her books one large bookstore would hold? Ten? Twenty? And get a square yard on the field and stack it to the height of the stadium. That would be a great number of books. Do that with the entire field and all the seats and then repeat it 3,999 times. Picture a grid 63 by 63 and in each square is a Giants Stadiums. This would dwarf most cities and you'd still be 16 stadiums short. Then you'd fill them all with Nora Roberts books.

What I'm getting at is if you think of all the trees, chemicals and energy used to manufacture that many books and the transportation of them, storage and disposal, it's hard for me to champion print. And this is just one author. Think if every other book, newspaper, magazine, office document or advertising flier in America were no longer on paper. Then spread this worldwide. Sure, there are environmental impacts when you make an electronic reader, but when I see how much paper I bundle for recycling every two weeks -- and my amount is low -- I can't imagine that if I had a reader that lasted even only two years the impact wouldn't be much less.

I can get as sentimental about the old way as anyone else, but something clearly better quashes such feelings.