Book

Oh wow. I’m currently reading The Gutenberg Revolution: How Printing Changed the Course of History by John Man.

Here are some staggering numbers I came across in just the first few pages:

Today, books pour off presses at the rate of 10,000 million a year. That’s some 50 million tonnes of paper. Add in 8,000 to 9,000 daily newspapers, and the Sundays, and the magazines, and the figure rises to 130 million tonnes. This is mountainous. It would make a pile 700 metres high – four times the height of the Great Pyramid.

For a bit of Australian flavour I did my own maths. 130 million tonnes of paper is more than four times the metric tonnage of steel in the Sydney Harbour Bridge. That’s what we’re printing every year. Consider how much of that is pulped or thrown away, not even recycled.

Every now and then someone lists environmental sustainability as a key argument for a faster shift to digital. But given these numbers perhaps sustainability should be a much higher priority.

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