How not to compare paper books and ebooks

I've recently seen an environmental comparison of using an ebook reader and paper books in an august US newspaper, and I was very impressed at how much it managed to get wrong - or at least the way it put a particular spin on things.

First it claims to be comparing paper books with 'e-readers like Apple's new iPad and Amazon Kindle,' and goes to on to quote very exact amounts of resources consumed in the manufacture like '33 pounds of minerals.' Yet the iPad and the Kindle are hugely different - there is no way a Kindle would have the same manufacturing footprint as an iPad. The article is also rather sneaky in comparing e-readers with 'a book made with recycled paper.' I'm not sure I've ever seen a book made from recycled paper. I'm not even sure it's possible to do cost effectively. This is not realistic - it's cheating. Almost all books are made from trees, with possibly a small percentage of recycled paper thrown in - get over it.

Next it talks about fossil fuels. There is plenty described about the energy hungry consumption in manfacture of electronics, but nothing about the fossil fuels used in cutting down trees and trucking the logs all over the place and converting them to pulp. Again, cheating here I'm afraid.

Then there's a bizarre section about reading the book. It says if you read a book in bed, you can save energy with an e-reader because of the cost of the electric light, but read in daylight and the paper book wins. Has this person never seen a Kindle? Yes, you could read an iPad in the dark (though I'm not sure many people would), but you can't read an e-ink based e-reader in the dark. It's not backlit. Doh.

In then asks how many volumes you need to read on an e-reader to break even (environmentally). The answer given is 40 to 50 on resources or 100 with global warming thrown in. And the conclusion the writer seems to give is this shows that paper books are best. Leaving aside the fact that the sort of people who buy an e-reader probably read 40 or 50 books in a single year, there's a huge problem here, at least when looking at the iPad. Most people who read books on an iPad had an iPad anyway. They didn't buy it to read ebooks.

I admit you aren't going to have a Kindle 'anyway' - reading books is what it is for. But if you have an iPad for other reasons, then once you've got it, reading books on it makes great environmental sense, because you are only comparing the incremental energy consumption with all the environmental cost of producing a paper book. Oh, and I notice the writer doesn't take into account the additional environmental impact of all the books that are made, transported to bookshops, transported back to the publisher, then pulped because of the idiotic sale or return system.

Don't get me wrong, although I do sometimes read things on my iPad, I still prefer 'real' books. I am very happy for people to buy real versions of my books - I think they are worth the environmental impact. (Though e-book fans should note that Inflight Science is currently at the bargain price of £2.49 at Amazon.co.uk or $4 at Amazon.com.) I love having books on the shelf in a way that having a pile of titles on an ebook reader will never satisfy. But please don't try to use pseudo-green arguments to turn people off e-readers. It's just wrong.

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5. However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor...

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense...

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