Textbooks: Dead Trees in a Backpack

Bryce Johnson is a contributing writer for Earth 911. Become an Earth 911 contributor.

It’s back to school time at my house. One of my sons is starting second grade and another will head back to preschool. It’s an exciting time of year full of anticipation and uncertainties.

Some things as parents we just “get” that our kids are still learning. We know that eventually they’ll feel at home in their new classrooms, make new friends, and learn new skills. We are also beginning to understand the environmental impact of traditional schooling.

At CaféScribe, the e-book company I founded a few years ago, we did some math. We took 10 typical textbooks from different subjects and came up with an average length of 715 pages each. Most college students have to purchase between 17 and 20 textbooks per year of college.

Conservation site Conservatree.org estimates that a 40-foot tree yields only about 8,300 pages of treated paper — in other words, less than a dozen textbooks for an entire tree. Just think about that. That means that during the course of a four-year college degree, a student is likely to use about six trees-worth of textbooks.

Close to 18 million students will attend college in the U.S. alone during the 2007-2008 school year. Some of the books they buy will be used textbooks of course, but the mind still boggles at the numbers. A college student spends about $1,000 a year on textbooks. And the prices are only going up.

I find it interesting that in a society that gets much of its news, entertainment and other information on the web we are still asking our students to lug around backpacks full of heavy, bulky dead trees. After all, electronic textbooks offer all kinds of advantages over and above the trees they save—they’re cheaper, easier to carry around and more easily searched.

You can hyperlink the text to other resources and easily connect with other folks studying the same material. CaféScribe is working to make textbooks available in e-book versions that are half the cost of conventional, dead-tree versions, with lots of other cool features to boot. Saving money and trees at the same time? It’s only a matter of time.

Don’t get me wrong; there is a place in everyone’s heart and home for good old-fashioned books. In my kids’ room we have our fair share of Dr. Seuss and other picture books. We like how books feel and smell. But my wife and I are also making an effort to read books from a digital format to our kids.

We are working our way through Huckleberry Finn and after that we’ll start Sherlock Holmes (my second grader is obsessed currently with spies and mysteries). We are trying to do our little part to help make sure that for generations to come, back to school time will continue to be a time of excitement and uncertainty, just with a little less harmful impact on mother earth.

For more information, visit the CaféScribe Web site.