Falling out of love with the Kindle

An article in last weekend's Observer brought into focus my growing ambivalence about my Kindle. When the Kindle was launched I gleefully joined the early adopters, revelling in the fact that I could read without consuming paper and, with lifelong 3G included, get new reading material on demand without relying on WiFi. But over the last year or so, I've lost some of that early enthusiasm. I'm no longer the eager advocate that I once was, for several reasons.

Disquiet about labour standards in the factory where the Kindle is made. Kindles are manufactured at Foxconn in China, which has been criticised for its poor labour conditions and its high suicide rate - and is now the subject of bribery allegations. I've avoided buying Apple products for several years because it manufactures there but only recently I was dismayed to discover that the Kindle is made there, too.

Concern about Amazon's tax status. Recently, Amazon has been criticised for its policy of tax avoidance. I now try not to buy from organisations that don't pay their fare share of tax but, once you've acquired a Kindle, it's not so easy to acquire your ebooks from another source.

Reluctance to trade with monolithic corporations. The problem with massive corporations like Amazon is that they squeeze smaller operators out of the market, reducing choice and damaging competition. By buying from them, we perpetutate a business model that will ultimately undermine our power as consumers.

Of course, other e-readers are available and may not suffer from the issues outlined above, but one inevitable drawback remains:

Ebooks remove the ability to share. One of the joys of paper books is that they can be freely loaned, borrowed and sold on - sadly not the case with ebooks. In my experience, most paper books are read only once by each person, but the more people that have the opportunity to become a pass-on reader, the more environmentally efficient the original production of that book becomes. Authors may, for this reason, prefer the ebook model but the passing on of paper books went on for many centuries before the invention of ebooks without any apparent damage to the livelihood of authors.

The pass-on readership of paper books has the potential to make them vastly more carbon-efficient than might otherwise be the case. And while the lending library quite rightly gets the final word as the most eco-efficient way of reading, it has the potential to erode the earning potential of authors. Maybe it's time to move to an entirely new business model for reading material - the rental of paper books, with a royalty paid to the author each time the book is rented. Circular economy thinking applied to the written word.

The dawn of the paperless book

With the publication of its Q4 results, Amazon.com has announced that it is now selling more Kindle books than paperback books. In 2010, for every 100 paperback books Amazon sold, it sold 115 Kindle books. During the same time period it sold three times as many Kindle books as hardcover books. These figures relate to Amazon.com's entire U.S. book business and include sales of books where there is no Kindle edition but exclude free Kindle books, so they are conservative.

I love my Kindle - the reading experience of the Pearl e-ink display is pleasingly like paper and it consumes very little energy - with wifi switched off the battery life is remarkably long. The device is lighter than all but the thinnest paperbacks, too. Acquiring a new title requires no paper and ink to be consumed, incurs no transport burden and creates no waste. There's the embodied energy in the e-reader to consider, of course, but I plan to keep mine for a very long time and I'm a voracious reader, so that should mean the carbon payback won't take too long.

I've been in the office equipment industry longer than I care to admit to, and all that time I've been hearing about the holy grail of the paperless office. Yet in a single year, Amazon has made real the dream of the paperless library.

Richard Barrington on scale

The final keynote at October's Green Monday was Richard Barrington, ex Sun, who began with the intriguing revelation that the reason Sun initially engaged with climate change was because its HQ is only 1m above sea level and the business deemed that global warming presented a corporate risk. The close proximity of the San Andreas fault, however, is not considered to pose an equal threat.

Richard's view is that seismic shifts are needed to effect the changes we need in global consumption patterns. They key to this is dematerialisation, with products giving way to services, and new business models along these lines are already being developed. But conventional thinking on intellectual capital won't allow us to achieve sufficient scale quickly enough.

An "open source" approach is needed to create the momentum for a new technology to spread with sufficient speed, similar to how Java has become so ubiquitous that Richard estimated every member of the audience had 3 pieces of Java on them.

There are already some good examples of the power of open source - Curriki being one. This online information resource (another project which originated at Sun) provides disadvantaged teachers and students around the globe with open access to high-quality educational materials, challenging the vested interests in education. This collaborative approach, with people freely sharing their knowledge, is rare in the commercial world, but in my experience the one place it's currently thriving is in sustainability circles. It's heartening to see how willing people are to share their knowledge and expertise on this topic.

But to really effect the change we need, the new technologies we develop must be substitutional, not additional. As Richard pointed out, commentators feared that the emergence of Amazon would kill books because we'd all download the texts. That didn't happen, and book sales are higher than ever.

His ultimate conclusion was that we have no choice but to embrace the new world order because our challenge is about survival of the species; the planet will take care of itself, and may do a better job without us.