Teenage back health is important. I remember filling my bag with books back then, I’m glad my son won’t have to. His posture should be better than mine.

Hopefully he's not hunched over a phone screen instead of bent double under a backpack of dead trees.

I remember shoving a paperback in my pocket. Weighed about the same as a phone. Do textbooks no longer exist? I’ll confess I’m out of touch, as my kids aren’t yet of school age.

I don’t know, but it seems like there is more lean into school issues tablets now. They get real books also, just no need to go overboard.

Until I started taking AP classes, I didn't really have to carry around any textbooks throughout my schooling. High school class of 2019 here.

But they cost money and are not as easy to access when you want a specific one. Especially ones in other languages.

They frequently cost less than ebooks, particularly if you buy them second hand. I don’t think I’ve paid more than €1 for a book (apart from rare volumes) in years. Abebooks have it all.

There's this cute little series that could be fun for a teenage girl learning French. Not that expensive, tell how much it costs at Abebooks:

https://www.amazon.fr/Angélique-5-révolte-Anne-Golon/dp/2266...

Between less than €1 and €3.

https://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/SearchResults?sts=t&cm_sp...

You can get them for free in these things called libraries.

Libraries are an odd artifact of history. They exist today because they are an undeniable public good.

If they didn't already exist they would never be allowed to come to exist in today's world. It would be considered wholesale IP theft and people would be arguing that the very notion of the idea would be the death of creativity.

Many of the problems of smartphones are not intrinsic to the technology but are a reflection of that modern world. Many people would call that late stage capitalism, but without much of that capitalism the technology wouldn't exist.

This has turned into a ramble, I apologize.

Can't find english books as easily in libraries if you are in a non english speaking country.

> These strange papery things are also rather portable.

I remember having books transported through an ocean and paying half of my allowances every month to get two of them while I was in middle school. Same when my kid was born: pre-school kids' books are massively absent from ebooks, publisher assume they won't have a device and don't really care about accessiblity, and it's a real PITA to find books that are either out of publication or in foreign languages.

Portable they are not, at least compared to a few MO of data this days.

I think the underlying assumption in this thread is that "books" are a commodity and are purely interchangeable. You just give "books" to your kids and they'll like it. I'd disagree.

1. Books are portable, but they're much less portable than phones.

2. Not all books are available, or available locally, or available locally in the language you want.

3. Phone book readers don't normally have adverts, videos, or other distractions. If yours does, you should check other options.

* * *

Do you have any stats on resource use of making an ebook reader or ipad versus books? I don't but would be curious.

I don't have the sources available, so the following is a short summary from memory:

Paper is produced using a mix of recycled paper and newly harvested trees. Overall, paper is usually recycled up to 7 times, and it really is due to the need of recycled paper for each production. Actually, paper manufacturers have whole departments responsible for the sourcing of recycled paper.

Trees come from, most of time, dedicated tree farms. Those are, by virtue of being needed, operated in a sustainable manner, meaning new trees are constantly planted to replace the harvested ones. Due to the growth periods of trees, there are a lot more trees in those forest than are needed for harvesting (fun fact, the term sustainability comes from 19th (?) century book about wood and forest cultivation).

While paper production requires a lot of energy, the industry is by now really good in serving as a way to load balance grids. They sell and buy energy, mostly electricity but also heat / gas, on spot markets and through long term contracts. Bring to readily pull huge amounts of energy, and also being able to reduce energy consumption almost immediately (production and production planning just love that by the way), their overall impact on energy consumption is nowhere as bad as people think. Added benefit, the majority of theirbraw material actually are renewable, they even store CO2 while growing.

On the other side you have electronc devices: rare earths, needing internet and server farms, have to be charged all the time. Raw materials have to be reycled, and not at a reasonable rate. Recycling happens in poor countries and causes all kinds of health environmental problems.

The main reason why retail moves from mailed advertizing to apps is simple: data. Putting the ads in an app, connected to whatever benefit program people are part of, allows for much better data collection and analysis that paper based advertizing.

Books are similar, added benefit of books is basically unlimited storage capability.

> I don't think we should kill more trees and require that kids continue lugging around backpacks full of heavy textbooks when we have a better alternatives. (To be fair, an e-reader without constant internet access would fit the bill, at least for this particular example.)

Those dead trees can survive up to 50 years in the hands of children, mobile devices tend to break down significantly faster and create considerably more waste. Just have a copy of the books for school and one for home and you would probably get rid of 90% of the pointless book carrying I did as a kid.

Lets be real - ebooks are way more portable than paper books.