The publication and distribution of books is going planetary very fast. The leading biggest book seller, Barnes and Noble, has just promoted the former head of their online book business to be the head of the whole company.

Ebooks are the way forward in the book world and it means that anyone anywhere on our planet with a device that purveys the digital image of a book page will have instant access to vast numbers of new and old books.

Trees will be saved, fuel spent shipping books all over the world today will be saved. Also, authors who can get their books on line can get their books directly to their readers. Even the construction of bookshelves will drop sharply. Also, library staff will probably decline.

For the citizens of OFP this is great good news. It means a great planetary resource is available to all for little cost. In, say, 5 years, the book’s role in Our Future Planet will be phenomenally good. Books plus literacy and intelligence should lead to greater planetary wisdom!

Yes – all sounds positive, even utopian. But….
From the author’s point of view the web holds great uncertainties. Looking at the music industry, we can see that online piracy has destroyed the value of recorded music. That feeds back to lower incomes for musicians and composers. So protection from copyright theft will be essential if the promise of lower-cost, universal distribution is to be fulfilled.
Then there is the power of the distributors. The old publisher/bookseller model may have cut down a lot of trees, but it did ensure that the market was fragmented, due to the low barriers to entry. That may seem to be the case in the digital future, but as it turns out, a few monster companies dominate – Amazon, Google. Do we trust these companies not to exercise their quasi-monopoly power. Do we hell! Look at the row over ophanned copyrights that Google has kicked off.
And online distribution requires online – so essentially this is for the rich, developed world. Outside the big cities in most African, Asian and South American countries, there’s no internet, no laptops, no regular power supply. As publishers switch off hard copies, what happens in the developing world?
So, as with every dramatic technological change, there are some big gainers – and some big losers. The overall cost to humanity may not be that simple to compute….and even the new internet-based model may have higher carbon costs than seems to be the case. Every new Kindle device has a big carbon footprint – what’s the break-even in number of books read? Every internet server consumes many megawatts; every mile of high-speed internet cable has its carbon as well as Paddy footprint….

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