SEATTLE, Washington - ‘I thought I was helping the environment,’ bewailed Margaret Yee, a systems analyst with a lending institution, ‘I had no idea e-books were so damaging to the environment.’ Her feelings were echoed by many after a new study revealed that global warming sharply increased after the advent of the e-book. ‘We assumed e-books were simply along for the ride,’ said researcher Allen Arther, ‘There was no assumption on our part that they were a causative factor. But the facts simply cannot be explained any other way.’
‘[There are] money-hungry, techno-challenged dweebs at the helm.’
– Ross Childrezza, head of People’s Right to Read
The problem, postulate researchers, is the incredible amount of energy required to successfully pay for, download, and open the e-books. ‘Particularly using the Adobe scheme, we found that to download a 2 megabyte e-book required a user actively participating in various logins, registrations, and downloads for an average of 12 hours, resulting in an average of 173.2 megabytes of data transfer,’ explained Arther, ‘Boiling all that down to kilowatt hours of energy shows that e-books consume approximately 18 times the fossil fuel of an equivalent published work.’”
4 Comments
Is this accurate? Where is the citation for this claim?
The story was a parody. I didn’t find it really that funny.
By the way, you would be using less energy with your Palm if you got a Palm Zire 21. Let’s make that the flagship of the Palm line.
I *wrote* that article. I had been trying for days to download and read Scott Adams’ “God’s Debris”. I finally managed it after a two-hour discussion with their support group. I downloaded and installed so many versions of so much crap, I couldn’t believe what it took to do it. I’ll never do it again.
The article was a way to get my frustrations out.
I didn’t mean to offend you. It was a funny article–I was just concerned by the sentiment when I first read it, and it put me in a defensive mood. You hear a lot of funny things about ebooks from people these days.
And I can identify with your frustrations over downloading ebooks. Sometimes it is a real pain, and I have had some problems with some online stores. I have never had a problem with Palm Digital Media, though, and I would recommend them if you haven’t tried them.
Also, it’s possible that you are having problems because you are still using a PPC. I would totally recommend getting a Palm. It makes things so much easier.
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