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Physical. Support your local library!
Support your planet, package handlers, and delivery man by going digital. I worked for a shipping company couple years back to pay for school and let me tell you, I would literally load up a half truck with 50 pound boxes of books. Now imagine the carbon footprint of that, not just the amount of trees that had to be cut down, but the emissions from the manufacturing of the paper, ink, glue that goes into the book. Then imagine the carbon emissions from the planes, semis, and delivery trucks that go into delivering that book to a bookstore or library or your home.
Libraries are funded from local and municipal taxes so you renting a book from them is not support, and honestly they do offer digital rentals of ebooks so please stop murdering the planet with your physical books. mmkay
Data centres and “the cloud” are not great for the environment either. DRM forcing people to have their files constantly deleted and redownloaded makes it even worse.
Also, “support” doesn’t have to mean a direct financial transaction. Libraries operate a bit differently from a McDonalds. Even just going in and sitting in a library reading a book without ever taking it out can help to support your local public library.
You understand that the carbon footprint of a 20 mb book on your computer or the cloud is miniscule compared to physical book productions though, some data centers are actually carbon neutral too.
Perhaps. Or perhaps what uses more over a lifetime is an ebook that is bounced around from device to device which all turn to toxic e-waste after a few years, constantly communicating with always-on servers for account data and DRM authentication hosted in a data centre based in a region powered by fossil fuels. All while a paper book just sits on a shelf causing no further environmental impact - potentially for hundreds of years.
To be fair, nobody’s preference for paper books or ebooks will change the environment in any meaningful way - the problems are much more systemic and require radical action from an unwilling corporate and political elite that has been ignoring the problem for decades.