Books And The Dead Tree Test: Do These Picks Pass It? (PHOTOS)

Forget profitability, forget the market. Over a year ago, we raised the question of whether or not a book should pass a dead tree test in order to justify its existence in print. Every day we receive piles of books from publishers all over the world and every day we hear HuffPost staff ask, "Where are the good ones?" Or, "Why is this a book instead of a website?"

There's a lot of death involved in making a book. Even if specially farmed trees are used, there's still a whole ecosystem being brought down when the trees are cut. Particularly paradoxical are the beautifully produced books on...how much we waste our resources. Ouch. And in this day and age, readers are used to getting information on the web--such as diet, health and other how-to--that they used to get in books.

Well, HuffPost staff has its own opinions. What are yours? Let us know in the comments section below.

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'American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food'

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This could easily be a website. And when the author is complaining about waste, seems a little hypocritical to be wasting trees on printing an unnecessary book.

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This could easily be a website. And when the author is complaining about waste, seems a little hypocritical to be wasting trees on printing an unnecessary book.

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Total comments: 52 | Post a Comment

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Rank #2  |  Average: 4

Save The Trees! Worth It

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Comments

[Dawnie Q]

06:59 PM on 01/24/2011

Not everyone reads the internet, believe it or not. Many older people who don't use computers like the World Watch annual state of the world publication. Not to mention poor people without internet. This is a pretty elitist one HP.

[Amy Hertz]

06:40 AM on 01/25/2011

Point taken.

[genebasler]

02:31 PM on 01/24/2011

A) I want to be able to hold a book in my hands, and I'm not going to be made to feel guilty about it, especially when we're not asking the real question: Why isn't my book made of HEMP PAPER, and why aren't folks agitating for the legalization of INDUSTRIAL HEMP and hastening the technological obsolescence of wood pulp? And
2) When psychos from both the left and the right finally succeed in severely regulating the internet, you may be glad you had a hardcopy of what you say "should be a website".

Ya gotta be some kind of authoritarian sociopath even to suggest that you know best what type of canvas an artist should paint on. Why is this book not a website? What kind of question is that?

[patrickmcdougal]

01:23 PM on 01/24/2011

I love when someone writes an idiotic article and than doesn't have the gall to stand behind it and put their name on it.

[teaserpony]

12:34 PM on 01/24/2011

What about all the coal used in power plants to make electric power to run computers???. What about all the heavy metals use in the Kindle,laptops and other electronic gadgets??? Books are a small amount of the fiber use from wood. Most the fiber is wasted on packaging. Books can be used over and over again... for years and books are a recyclable product.

[Apuuli]

11:45 AM on 01/24/2011

The author apparently doesn't realize that one cannot make money from a website, like you can from a book. Duh! And, the fact remains, that people still like reading actual books. Myself included.

[FeelinGroovy]

11:38 AM on 01/24/2011

Agreed.

But, please stop using the dead phrase "in this day and age" when a simple "today" or "now" would do. It's older than corsets and bloomers and has absolutely no meaning.

[Calvin Ravenwood]

11:27 AM on 01/24/2011

It's not the books themselves that are bad...its what publishing houses are cranking out as books that are bad....I mean come on, why would anyone want to read Nanookie of the North's rhetoric in Going Rogue...and why wasn't that on the list??? A few trees died for that run, right HuffPo? ;-)

[Amy Hertz]

05:00 PM on 01/24/2011

Just looking at books that came in this month.

[Calvin Ravenwood]

05:59 PM on 01/24/2011

;-) Article made me think in more general terms...Killing trees for what publishing houses have been putting out instead of making them digital material.

[Ampoliros]

11:10 AM on 01/24/2011

Nothing by KJA gets past the dead tree test...

[Jeremy Mcwatters]

10:59 AM on 01/24/2011

Grow HEMP. Done.

[FeelinGroovy]

11:38 AM on 01/24/2011

Yes!

[satanlite]

01:23 PM on 01/24/2011

Yuppers.

[raven119]

10:58 AM on 01/24/2011

Like I need to spend more time online discovering web sites...

[ivanrich]

10:35 AM on 01/24/2011

HuffPost clearly needs to do some research into "green" printing and sustainable growth forests - check out the Forest Stewardship Council website: www.fsc.org. That "print is evil" baloney is real convenient for you when you're trying to position yourself as all tech-forward, but it's basically not true.

[George Randall Leake III]

10:35 AM on 01/24/2011

Why the automatic assumption that paper is made from wood pulp (i.e. trees)? It has only been a common source for making paper in the past 190 years--there are many much more sustainable sources for paper making, some much more abundant & renewable, almost all of which are acid-free--wood pulp notoriously has lignin, a substance that causes the paper to turn brown and fall apart with time. Marijuana legalization advocates quickly point out that hemp is a good substitute, and while this is true, Kudzu is a much better alternative, and it grows all over the country, especially on the sides of highways in the South.

[jamalc]

10:39 AM on 01/24/2011

Lord YES. Something needs to be done about this Kudzu!

[hereIamHuff]

10:29 AM on 01/24/2011

Someone else did the research. "How green is my iPad?": http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/04/04/opinion/04opchart.html

[Apuuli]

11:43 AM on 01/24/2011

Perhaps if you use the iPad to read only a few books then the book might win this comparison. But I assume the iPad will be used to read perhaps hundreds of books, so the iPad wins.

[jthor]

01:17 PM on 01/24/2011

not really. the ipad can't be recycled, the toxins in it are poison in landfills. and it requires fossil fuels to keep it running. a book can be re-sold and if damaged beyond comprehensibility it can be easily recycled into new books. this whole kindle/ipad/nook thing is being propelled by the tech-science industry as innovation and progress when in fact it is just another gadget that will pollute much more than it will "save" trees.

[gnosius]

10:21 AM on 01/24/2011

So, your point is that no book in that pile of books you receive is the "good one." The question is, who decides what's a good book. First and foremost, for some of us a good book has to be non-fiction. Then it has to tell the truth or to advance a plausible possibility. We live though in a world when everything is profit-driven. Profit, however, does not guarantee quality. When a couple of years ago Simon&Schuster hired a new boss, he declared that his ambition was to publish only those books that are well researched and offer something valuable to our civilization. Guess who's publishing though Glen Beck's books: no other than Simon&Schuster. If it is profitable, they would cut down the trees in a hurry.

[Jon Lere]

12:21 PM on 01/24/2011

I'd be surprised if they actually read any of the books on the list. This article should be in the comedy section, since comedy requires no actual research.

[PlatoSunTsu]

09:48 AM on 01/24/2011

Drawing attention to these books will undoubtedly pique interest in more than a few of them...HuffPo via this article just killed at least a few acres of trees...I love irony.

[Paul Reed]

10:27 PM on 02/10/2011

Internet publishing is simply not the same as real, book publishing. Authors write books because they want to reach audiences and, yes, because they need to be paid for work. Publishing writing on the internet is not yet a paid endeavor for most authors. So, this story is bogus, in my opinion, for offering the vacuous theme here - that these authors are somehow hypocrites for wanting to publish their work in book form.