Consider the fuel consumption alone behind the production of paper, the printing of books and the transporting of these books to bookstores worldwide. If the cloud infrastructures we're building and the digital screens we're inventing can alleviate the need for paper, that alone is reason enough to cease and desist.I realize that a lot has been written about the carbon footprint of cloud computing, but this direct statement in the context of the publishing industry makes me wonder if the single-sourcing of carbon footprint alone makes it worthwhile changing media from physical to virtual.
Let me be more clear about that question.
I'm sure there have been numerous studies of the relative carbon footprints of printed vs electronic books (like this paper, with some interesting [ab]use of the English language) but what I'm interested in here is the benefit of moving your carbon footprint from a multitude of sources down to a single source (i.e., electric generation to power everything in the cloud). I tend to believe that a single source of waste is better than multiple sources, since it's easier to eliminate waste from a single, well-known source than it is to track down and optimize multiple, smaller sources.
As Srivatsav states, there are a number of different places in the production and delivery of books that each introduce their own waste: paper production, printing, binding, shipping, heating and air conditioning physical bookstores. Each of those steps potentially has its own unique externalities (paper pulp, ink disposal, binding glues, exhaust from delivery trucks, etc.). In the cloud, we have massive data centers, increasingly powered by renewable energy sources. And where they are not green, they can more easily be made green because of consolidation.
