I know people have had a go at working out the carbon footprint for various Internet activities, but I’m not sure anyone has come up with anything reliable yet.

There are many ways to generate energy, such as wind, water, geothermal, wind, tidal.

As I write this, the Google Solar Panel Project alone has created around 9,500 kilowatt-hours in the last 24 hours:

http://www.google.com/corporate/solarpanels/home

They say that’s equivalent to 79,333 hours of flat screen TV watching or 3,461 loads of laundry. That sounds like quite a bit to me.

It’d be interesting to see the figures you’re basing your statement on.

Thanks for contributing.

Quite predictable really. That’s why there are so few booksellers these days. It’s why bookseller premises are getting smaller and smaller, like the new Borders shops that are opening up everywhere. Tiny they are. They can hardly squeeze a paperback in the doorway, they’re so small.

And the sales. Drastic sales statistics, books have. That’s why the companies have to spend the billions they do on advertising – they just can’t get the revenue.

Yeah, let’s start a hate-the-book campagne. We’ll have a hate-the-book day when we can pile all our books on the green and have a great fire. Beats Guy Fawkes’ night.

And, hey, let’s not stop at the book. All their relations, the newspaper, the mag, the journal. Let’s get rid of them too. In fact, it’s paper. That’s the commodity we have to dispel. For without paper, there’d be no illicit books and the like. Card too, and cardboard. Lest someone succeeds in publishing a carboard book. They’d try it you know. The publishers. Anything to keep the books flowing.

Well, we can stop that.

Yes, nothing like a good hate scheme to get rid of the things you hate. Hate paper, hate card, hate cardboard, hate leaflets, hate mags, hate newspapers, hate booklets, hate books. Burn the libraries. That’s what to do. That’ll teach them to cherish books.

Colin, I don’t know that the print on-demand would satisfy a very big market. I don’t want my books in print, so I wouldn’t use it.

Those of my friends who still ‘love’ books, also love the whole production stuff with them: the fancy covers, the binding, the new book smell and all that. I suspect that on-demand printing couldn’t satisfy those requirements.

Hmmm, starting to ponder the parallels between the music industry and the book industry….

It shows what Colin is talking about. How cool it would be to get your books printed on-demand. Now all we need is that technology that can reprint on paper….

Think about it: a book is easy to handle, small enough to be portable but large enough to see clearly, cheapish to produce, and hard to copy. Don’t underestimate that last point. Publishers want to make money of selling copies and people hate DRM.

A middle way option that we might see soon is ‘on demand’ printing. The bookshop would have a machine that prints books, and you’d go down there, browse through their electronic catalogue, and pay for what you want to be printed while you had coffee. By using a local shops – even if we are shopping online – we get rid of the carbon footprint of shipping dead trees to the US, printing them into books, and shipping them back.