by Edward Milford
10. February 2009 03:10
There has been an assumption, which I am sure this blog will return to frequently, that somehow electronic publishing, or more specifically the electronic delivery of information, is somehow an environmental ‘get out of jail free’ card for publishers. Cutting down trees then using large quantities of energy to turn them into paper, shipping the paper round the world via printers and publishers’ warehouses simply must be less efficient, so the argument goes, than just clicking to download a pdf and reading the same information straight on a computer screen.
Two researchers have created a bit of a storm recently by claiming that two Google searches use the same amount of energy as making a cup of tea. The reporting of their findings have been rather overstated (and it would have to have been a small cup of tea from a very efficient kettle anyway) and I suspect there are a number of dubious assumptions both in the researchers’ figures, and those that Google themselves report which are about two orders of magnitude lower. However, it does serve to highlight the issue of the energy consumption of our IT infrastructure.
Figures quoted for the global energy consumption of the IT sector go up to 5% of total global energy consumption; again these vary depending on the assumptions that each person doing the calculations makes. That certainly dwarfs publishing, particularly book publishing, and particularly that section of book publishing that could relatively easily be substituted by people doing Google searches.
