Bob Schildgen

But there’s a wild card in all this, namely the library card. My numbers are based on a single use of a book. Yet each time somebody reads a library book, its environmental burden is reduced, because its production requires only a onetime resource use, whereas the e-device needs power for each use. Moreover, paper books can survive hundreds of years and readings; the e-reader, if it has its ancestors’ DNA, is doomed to a comparatively brief existence. Hence, as Nicholson Baker concluded in his cantankerous book about books, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, it may be premature to wantonly abandon paper tomes. And there will always be a place for public libraries.