The Best Ways to Save Trees and Money

Paper is a major component of every book and tends to be the focus of most environmental discussions in the publishing industry. There are thousands of Books and magazines publishers in the world and the global impact of this is astonishing. For instance, if a publisher sells a million copies of an average 250-page book, it takes 12,000 trees to produce just this one title.

Most trees used for books production come from so called "managed timberlands". These trees are an agricultural crop - like vegetables on a farm. They are grown to be made into products for human use. Not using paper in order to save trees is like not eating salad in order to "save" vegetables. However, Tree farms are not biologically diverse and the result is a worldwide loss of wildlife habitat and soil erosion.

Every year, tens of millions of trees are cut down in the production of books, and the $40 billion book industries have demonstrated limited concern regarding the impact on the environment. Anything we can do to save on paper use can help alleviate these problems, not to mention saving resources like water and energy, and two of the easiest ways are:

• Rent a Book. BookSwim is the first online book rental library club lending you paperbacks and hardcover directly to your house without the need to purchase! Whether it's New Releases, Bestsellers, or Classics, they got over 185,000 titles to choose from, with free shipping both ways! Starting at $14.99, you can read your books as long as you want. Even choose to purchase and keep the titles you love. The book rental model is the ideal distribution schema for environmentally conscious readers. "Renting a book instead of purchasing means that less paper is consumed and, ultimately, less trees are cut down," says chief operating officer, Shamoon Siddiqui.

• Read an eBook. According to Wikipedia, an e-book (for electronic book: also eBook) is the digital media equivalent of a conventional printed book. Such documents are either read on personal computers, or on dedicated hardware devices known as e-book readers or e-book devices. They have many advantages compared to paper ones. Just to name a few:

1. Text can be searched automatically, and cross-referenced using hyperlinks.
2. Less physical space is required to store them. Because they take up little space, e-books can be offered indefinitely, with no 'out of print' date.
3. Readers can benefit from the adjustment of text size and font face. Text-to-speech software can be used to automatically convert them to audio books.
4. Although they require electricity to be read, the production of eBooks does not consume the paper, ink, and other resources that are used to produce print books.

You can find some excellent sources of free eBooks, such as:

• The Ebooks Online Library
• eBooks Cube
• Free-eBooks.net

If you are looking specifically for recycling, alternative energy and sustainability eBooks, check this link:

• Cool Green eBooks resources