What's wrong with killing trees that were grown specifically for paper? You're just taking CO2 out of the atmosphere, helping reduce global climate change.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said "In the long term, a sustainable forest management strategy aimed at maintaining or increasing forest carbon stocks, while producing an annual sustained yield of timber, fibre or energy from the forest, will generate the largest sustained mitigation benefit".

http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg3/ar4-wg3-cha...

You've got a point there, but shipping that book to where I live halfway around the world in New Zealand isn't doing climate change any favours.

I think you're overthinking it. I'm pretty sure other people in NZ are buying the same book, the marginal impact of shipping one copy must be very close to zero.

I've got a Kindle but I wouldn't trade my hardcover GEB for an electronic version.

Killing trees takes CO2 out of the atmosphere? I think you've got this backwards.

Growing trees to make them into timber, pulp, etc. takes CO2 out of the atmosphere. As long as you're not growing them to burn them, it's one of the most effective CO2 sequestration methods we have.

77% of tree usage in the US is for timber and pulpwood. Fast-growing species are planted and harvested over a 10-20 year cycle so that as each section is cut down and replanted, another section is maturing. It's both sustainable business and an effective CO2 sink.

Thanks. That makes sense. My brain farted and I couldn't make the leap after "What's wrong with killing trees? You're just taking CO2 out of the atmosphere."

[citation needed]

It's really not. If you want a citation for "growing trees takes CO2 out of the atmosphere", a high school bio book will suffice -- the carbon mass of the tree is carbon extracted from the atmosphere (and dead plant mass in soil, but the carbon there came from the atmosphere too).

If you want a citation for growing trees for timber and pulp as an effective CO2 sink, the citation is right in the grandfather post (an international climate change study by the IPCC including researchers from over a dozen countries, how much more authoritative can we get?), or just look up the paper and timber industries on wikipedia.

I was more interested in the source for the specific number you gave. Should have been less snarky, sorry!

The US tree usage statistic originally came from TAPPI (the tree pulp, paper, packaging, and converting industry assocation).

To anyone looking to purchase themselves some dead trees, I recommend that you pick up an older second hand copy. I have it on good authority that the recent 20th anniversary reprint is of a much lower quality, with crappy thin pages and less clear type.

Possessing both versions, I can confirm that the paper in the anniversary edition is thinner, but I think if anything the type is easier to read. YMMV, of course.

In my case, it's more a matter of praticality. My nook is lighter than a book and contains many books, so if I don't feel like reading one type of book I can switch easily.

Less importantly, I can hold the nook with one hand and still be able to turn pages. I travel by bus, so this is useful to me - my other hand can hold a coffee ;)

There's a pdf on tpb, so there should be a legitimate version somewhere.

I have the original as hardcover, but also wanted to be able to read on the go on the iPad, so I downloaded the ebook.

It's a scan with OCR. Unfortunately the OCR is bad on many parts of the page - random occurences of %, ' and other characters are common. Also some words are totally unreadable.

Overall, I still read sometimes on the iPad, but having to go back to the hardcover if I'm totally lost.

I just noticed that after I downloaded. Pretty unfortunate.

Oh well, one more dead tree won't hurt anyone.

Just because there is a PDF (or ePub etc.) of a book exists doesn't mean there is an official ebook. Some pirates scan books and either upload those each-page-is-one-image pdfs or (worse) they OCR these images andc upload that text.

Hit your friendly neighbourhood used bookstore.

Here is an easy way for Kindle/ePub/PDF ...

http://www.magicscroll.net

As far as I can tell this is a web-based ePub reader. How does this help reading GEB on a Kindle/...?

Can an admin please remove the parent comment?

We should not be promoting and posting links to pirated material here.