Half the forest isn't enough - A smart (and funny) video of Great Bear Rainforest explains why!

Who said that activism can't be funny, even when it deals with serious issues?

Check out this video from the Rainforest Solutions Project:

Take It Taller from Great Bear Rainforest on Vimeo.

Here are more details on this important campaign, which is organized by a joint initiative of Greenpeace, ForestEthics, and Sierra Club BC:

No matter which way you cut it, protecting 50% of a forest isn't enough to save the whole.

British Columbians helped put this province on the map by calling for the protection of the Great Bear Rainforest. In 2006, provincial and First Nations decision-makers heard you and signed an agreement to save one of the last coastal temperate rainforests of its kind from being destroyed by clearcut logging.

But today, logging is still allowed in 50% of the Great Bear Rainforest. It’s time to take action again and tell the provincial government to Take It Taller by committing to protect more than just half of the Great Bear Rainforest from logging.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Plant a tree for every book you read!

Recommended book on Kickstarter: Ballad of a Bottom Feeder- A love story

Kickstarter is a great place to fund interesting new products and projects, including books. Great books. So we decided we want to help spread the word on book projects we like on Kickstarter and every weekend we'll share one with you.

Today's Kickstarter book is Ballad of a Bottom Feeder- A love story, a love story by Andre Karpov that takes place on the bottom of the ocean between a Hermit Crab and a Sea Anemone. Their courtship is based on an actual occurrence in nature known as a symbiotic relationship.

Goal: $5,000

Pledged so far: $1,520 (32 backers)

Still missing: $3,480

Days left: 27 days (until March 4)

Here's a description of the project:

I first came upon this example of symbiosis while visiting the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. I was fascinated by the idea that members of two different biological species could bond and live together while helping in each others' survival. I extensively researched this and gathered much inspiration while living and working on the coast of Northern California. I wrote a 24-page children's story and illustrated it with pen & ink and watercolor. With your help, this book can be published! Some of the Illustrations and story can be viewed below.

I will also be releasing a song based on the story: "ballad of the bottom feeder available for download with a purchase of the book.

The story begins:
In the company of urchins and abalone, Its easy to get lonely.

With their SPINY skin and hardened shells whether or not they're feeling I can't tell.

Let them be angry, let them be sad, I am a happy hermit crab.

Insignificantly small on the bottom I feed and crawl.

The rest of the story involves their romance and adventures as they dodge predators and find prey, bonded in a symbiotic relationship; the hermit crab benefits by gaining the added protection from predators using the anemone's stinging tentacles, and the anemone benefits by gaining mobility and sharing portions of the hermit crab's meals.

I would like this book to gently teach our children to respect nature in her many forms of symbiotic partnerships and to instill an awareness of the smaller creatures who share our biosphere.

You can learn more about Ballad of a Bottom Feeder- A love story at http://kck.st/y21LGp

Last week's Kickstarter recommendation - Passion for Place: Community Reflections on the Carmel River Watershed

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Plant a tree for every book you read!

Top 100 green apps - Locavore

We are creating a list of the top 100 apps that will help you go green as part of our effort to promote a more sustainable lifestyle. Apps become an integral part of our life and a valuable tool and we believe we should also take advantage of them when it comes go greening up our life.

Every Friday we update you with a new app on the list, and today we're happy to introduce an app for the local food lovers, aka the locavores.

Our app is Locavore from Local Dirt. This app is for iPhone and iPad and android and is free.

Here are more details about Locavore App:
*One of TIME Magazine’s Top iPhone apps of 2009
*O’Reilly’s #1 app for Shopping Green
*App Craver’s Best iOS apps for Foodies

**WE ARE UPDATING THE SEASONALITY INFORMATION RIGHT NOW**
It’s your seasonal, local food network.

Based on your phone’s GPS location, Locavore will make searching for in-season, local food a breeze by pinpointing farms and farmers’ markets nearest you. Read all about them on their profile page, find that specific local item you have been looking for or just check out what’s in-season right now. Plus, you can get recipe suggestions to make with your delicious local food and then, brag about it to all your friends through Facebook.
Features:
1 - Browse what’s in-season and soon to come
2 - Locate farms and farmers’ markets near you
3 - Find who is selling it and where
4 - Get details about your local farmers’ market
5 - Discover recipes for local, in-season items
6 - Post what you ate locally to Facebook

Locavore is powered by Local Dirt. www.LocalDirt.com is an online site where anyone can buy, sell, feature and find local food. Part of us is located in beautiful Madison, WI and the others are in sunny (sometimes foggy) San Francisco, CA. We are always looking for inventive ways to improve the Local Food movement; we’re listening, so leave us your feedback. If something is not working as expected, contact us before you leave a review and we are happy to help.
For news and updates on the app, follow @enjoy_locavore on Twitter



You can check top 100 green apps at http://www.ecolibris.net/greenapps.asp. As you'll see, this list is in work, but we promise to update it every week until we'll have all 100 green apps.

Last week's green app - Whirleo.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Plant a tree for every book you read!

A new children's book, Calyx of Teversall by Maia Appleby, is going green with Eco-Libris!

We are happy to update you on a new book that is going green with Eco-Libris. This time it is a great children's book - Calyx of Teversall by Mia Appleby.

The book is published by our partner, Brighter Books, a Canadian independent publishing house dedicated to bringing only the best books to life. Brighter Books is planting 300 trees with Eco-Libris for Calyx as part of its commitment to plant a tree for every book sold!

Brighter Books Publishing House was founded by Angela and Dean Jurgensen, a couple with a diverse background. Angela is a Brazilian artist, illustrator, writer and business owner, who grew up surrounded by fiction books, particularly the classics; Dean is a Canadian electronic engineer with a passion for learning new things, who spends most of his free time reading educational books. They have a positive outlook for the world, as long as everyone does their part to make the world a better place; Brighter Books Publishing House is their attempt to do their part.

Here are more details on Calyx of Teversall:

Written by Maia Appleby, Illustrations by Angela Souza
Category: Middle Readers
Imprint: Platypus
Age: 8 and up

After a few years of learning his uncle’s business at the curio shop -- and singlehandedly establishing a trading partnership with the gnomes -- the clever and resourceful Calyx can practically run the shop himself.

Things are going so well that he almost forgets why he’s living with his aunt and uncle: his mother is hiding him from a menacing, manipulative Borgh elf named Fenbeck, who could arrive in town any day to claim Calyx as his apprentice. With a classical pace, hints of Rumpelstiltskin and touches of gnome wisdom, this exciting, endearing tale will be treasured by parents and children alike.

Calyx is available on Amazon.com. For more details on the book, visit Brighter Books at http://www.brighterbooks.com/

Other books we green up with Brighter Books:

The Guardian by C.J. Gosling.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Plant a tree for every book you read!

Top 100 book apps: Free Books - 23,469 classics to go!

Since we believe in the digital future of books as a way to reduce eventually the footprint of books, we also believe in apps. Book apps are integral part of the digital age of books and we want to share with you some great book apps we find and thus we are assembling a list of the top 100 book apps.

In order to get into our list apps need to both book/ebook related and affordable - we choose only apps that are either free or cost less than $2.

So every Monday we will update you with a new app on out list of top book apps. Today we're happy to introduce you an app that helps you find free books.

Our app today is Free Books - 23,469 classics to go by Spreadsong. This app is for iPhone and iPad and it's free.

Here are more details about the Free Books App:
Ah, to describe an app in two words... Free Books is just that- Free Books! Browse our handpicked collections, download any of our 23,469 classic books, and read with our fully featured ereader. Notes, highlights, bookmarks, dictionary support -- it’s all here.

Have your own ebooks? We have you covered, thanks to Dropbox integration and a fantastic ePUB reader. Just import your books and read anytime, anywhere.

Free Books unlocks a world of public domain content, allowing you to acquire the great books of human history. Letters of leaders, the collected works of geniuses, the finest Victorian novels, the plays of Shakespeare, the philosophy of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Carnegie. It's all here, along with tens of thousands of other books.

We could go on- personalized recommendations, beautiful high resolution covers, author pages, Email to Computer, Night Mode reading- but that would just get away from the point.

23,469 of the greatest books in human history, accessible with the tap of your finger. Free.

If you have any questions or suggestions don't hesitate to drop us a line at hello@classicly.com- that's what we're here for!

Last book app - Weird but True

You can check top 100 book apps at http://www.ecolibris.net/bookapps.asp. As you'll see, this list is in work, but we promise to update it every week until we'll have all 100 book apps.

You're also welcome to check our list of 100 green apps.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Plant a tree for every book you read!

Why the question now is when and not if Barnes and Noble will file for bankruptcy

In the last couple of years I started thinking B&N might file for bankruptcy because they have no strategy to transform their brick and mortar stores from a liability back to an asset. Now, after reading Julie Bosman's article 'The Bookstore’s Last Stand' on the New York Times, I'm more positive about it than ever.

Unfortunately after reading this article, I'm afraid the realistic question we need to ask is when B&N will go bankrupt and no if they'll actually do it. Here are five quotes from the article that will explain why:

1. "Mr. Lynch says Barnes & Noble stores will endure. The idea that devices like the Nook, Kindle and Apple iPad will make bookstores obsolete is nonsense, he says." - It's a 3-page article, yet you won't find there a word of explanation from CEO Lynch why its nonsense and how he plans to save his stores.

2. "For all the bells and whistles and high-minded talk, Barnes & Noble doesn’t exactly have the cool factor (or money) of, say, a Google or a Facebook." - Say no more. Do you really believe B&N can out-innovate Amazon and Apple with their very limited resources? I doubt that.

3. "Carolyn Reidy, president and chief executive of Simon & Schuster, says the biggest challenge is to give people a reason to step into Barnes & Noble stores in the first place. “They have figured out how to use the store to sell e-books," she said of the company. "Now, hopefully, we can figure out how to make that go full circle and see how the e-books can sell the print books.”" - She is right and I guess she also knows B&N haven't provided yet any good reason for most readers to step into their stores. I can only wonder if she believes they'll actually find a way to do it.

4. "And yet, in three years, he (William Lynch, CEO, B&N) has won a remarkable number of fans in the upper echelons of the book world. Most publishers in New York can’t say enough good things about him: smart, creative, tech-savvy — the list goes on." - It's definitely great to have a nice guy at the top of the pyramid, but with no answers on how to transform the stores back from a liability to an asset and with little vision on how to keep B&N in business, not to mention relatively poor results, Lynch needs less fans and more people that will tell you what he's doing wrong and how to fix it.

5. "No one expects Barnes & Noble to disappear overnight. The worry is that it might slowly wither as more readers embrace e-books." - two years ago no one in the media would even speculate such a thing. Now it has became a reasonable assumption, which shows you how high the probability that B&N will file for bankruptcy is.

To learn more on our B&N index series visit Barnes and Noble Bankruptcy Index on our website.

You can find more resources on the future of bookstores on our website at www.ecolibris.net/bookstores_future.asp

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Working to green the book industry!

Recommended book on Kickstarter - Passion for Place: Community Reflections on the Carmel River Watershed

Kickstarter is a great place to fund interesting new products and projects, including books. Great books. So we decided we want to help spread the word on book projects we like on Kickstarter and every weekend we'll share one with you.

The first one is Passion for Place: Community Reflections on the Carmel River Watershed, a book and CD project for and by the community and serves as a prototype for people in other communities.

This project is about creativity and the possibility of cultural change, understanding what ecological integrity means, and knowing that we are a part of that integrity.

The current status of the project is as followed:

Goal: $4,000

Pledged so far: $2,920 (28 backers)

Still missing: $1,080

Days left: 28 days (until Feb 25)

Here's a description of the project:
Wherever we live, sharing stories of our connection to rivers and land connect us to each other and remind us of what is important in our lives. We are reminded of the beauty, wonder, and spirit of the natural world. Creativity, in its greatest depths of the human psyche and genetic coding, emerges from the wildness of the natural world. When we allow wildness, our own spirit, to flourish within, we can also respect and allow nature’s spirit, the wild outside, to exist.

The stories, poems, and essays in the book are organized from the headwaters and source of the Carmel River, through the valley, and out to the lagoon and ocean. In addition, a CD of natural sounds combined with excerpts from interviews of eight community members will complete the anthology, taking the reader on a virtual experience of the Carmel River Watershed.

The Foreword is written by Freeman House, author of Totem Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species. Internationally recognized authors Terry Tempest Williams and Peter Forbes have granted use of quotes for the book. Dr. Barbara Mossberg has written the Introduction that will appear on the cover front flap.

Copies of Passion for Place will be given to local libraries, schools and public officials as well as to the writers and interviewees. I will do talks about the watershed and my paintings, read stories on my own and with other contributors to the book, have live music with readings, hold readings along the trails and river among other avenues of sharing.

Given Carmel Valley is a destination location, known around the country and world, this book will be a useful, informative, beautiful resource and anthology for people to get to know the community and land from various perspectives.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Plant a tree for every book you read!