Prints are dying, Digital is taking over.
Out of context: Reply #12
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- detritus0
re: 'books and papers require no power to use'.
As already pointed out by PeterH, you're not considering (nor are you claiming to, don't get me wrong) the energy expenditure in the creation of that media.
I started my career at a newspaper and was quite shocked by the daily energy use and material wastage on a medium whose primary purpose was to act as an advertising vehicle (content is secondary, apparently).
A recent cost/benefit analysis by (I think) NewsCorp showed that over a 12-18 month lifecycle, the costs (ie. the energy) employed to provide a subscriber with a Kindle was less than that to supply them a newspaper each day.
Now, appreciate how little energy these things use (they need only expend energy when changing the display or accessing data) and you can envisage a not-far-off product that self-charges with built in motion or remote-powered or whatever.
So, you have a handheld electronic library (not just a book) that is interactive, potentially networked and is 'self-powering'.
What then?