Amazon Kindle is finally here

Amazon finally unveiled today its new wireless reading device - Amazon Kindle.

We have followed the news on the upcoming device and also reported just two weeks ago on the expected delay in its introduction. Today we were happy to read on CNET that it finally happened - Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO unveiled Amazon's new electronic book reader at New York's W Hotel.

Kindle is very light and weights only 10.3 ounces. It has a black-and-white screen, a battery that will last several days to a week and a capacity for about 200 books (1,000 books with a slot for a standard SD memory card).

Kindle does not require a PC for synchronization or any software to be installed. The store is actually on the device and is stocking now more than 90,000 titles. Besides books, you can have access with it to magazines, newspapers, blogs and even Wikipedia.

It all sounds really great. The only downside is the price - $399, which makes it a relatively expensive gadget.

Still, it might be the beginning of the digital revolution of books. Bezos said today "Books have stubbornly resisted digitization. I think there's a very good reason for that, and that is, the book is so highly evolved and so suited to its task that it's very hard to displace." He is totally right and the question hanging in the air is whether the Kindle is suited to become a replacement.

My wish is that Kindle won't only become cheaper, but also be manufactured in an eco-friendly manner (right now I only know it's been manufactured by an undisclosed Chinese original equipment manufacturer), hopefully adopting cradle to cradle concepts.

Right now we know it will save a lot of trees and this is good news. If as a devise that is so advanced technologically, it will also become advanced environmentally, it would be great news.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: a great green gift for the holidays!

Deep Economy - Holiday green gift guide for book lovers: part 5

Welcome to part 5 of Eco-Libris blog's holiday green gift guide, the guide that will help you find the best green books to give as gifts this holiday season.

Today I am very happy to bring you a recommendation on a new book of the great Bill McKibben written by one of one of the most enthusiastic and talented green bloggers and writers in LA - Siel.

As a teenager, Siel sped past Paramount Studios every day on the 10 Metro bus to get to Fairfax High School. Now she cuts through the concrete jungle of Los Angeles on her pink Townie bike to shop at local farmers' markets and socialize in pre-loved Prada heels. Siel writes Emerald City, a green blog for latimes.com, as well as a personal blog, green LA girl.

Siel's recommendation for this holiday's gift is:

Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future

Author: Bill McKibben

Publisher: Times Books

Published in: 2007

What it is about: Drive alone into a gated community in the suburbs, to park in a private, 2-car garage and hole up in a secret internet room. This is what our wealth has bought us, according to McKibben: Ways to better seclude ourselves. In America, it's lonely being rich.

Deep Economy is most concerned about our sense of self in a "hyper-individualized world," a world in which we've been conditioned to deprioritize personal connections with other human beings in the pursuit of individual success, monetary or otherwise.

Personal ambition is important, of course. But to McKibben, these ambitions are too often one-sided — and unrealistic, in the age of mass media. It's one thing to keep up with the Joneses, quite another to keep up with The O.C., McKibben quips.

To prove his point, he takes you through multiple, wide-ranging journeys in Deep Economy: a year of spent eating only local food, a scientific and historical look at the possibilities of a community-based, post-petroleum agriculture, an exploration of mass media and the outlook on local radio, and a somewhat obligatory summary of the pending global warming crisis — a crisis that a more community-centered outlook can help mitigate, McKibben points out, as well as help absorb the aftershocks in the case of a true disaster.

Why it's a great gift: Deep Economy opens up a different way of thinking about happiness, individuality, community and ambition -- all while providing solid info on the most important issues facing us as a society today. Reading it's sure to give the recipient innovative and exciting ideas for starting off the new year!

Thank you Siel for a great recommendation!

If you choose to give your friends or family this book as a gift on the holidays, you are more than welcome to balance it out with Eco-Libris, add its sticker to the book and make it the perfect green gift for the holidays.

And just a reminder on past recommendations on our series:
Part 1 - The Man who Planted Trees by Jean Giono
Part 2 - Home Work : Handbuilt Shelter by Lloyd Kahn
Part 3 - The Joy of Vegan Baking by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau
Part 4 - The Tiny Seed by Eric Carle

The whole guide can be found here - http://www.ecolibris.net/holiday_guide.asp.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: a great green gift for the holidays!

24/7 Trivia is offering its players a special Eco-Libris promotion

This week is full of new collaborations for Eco-Libris. This time we're talking trivia.

Trivia is one of my favorite games and therefore I'm very happy that Eco-Libris is part of a green promotion run by a leading trivia website - 24/7 Trivia. The connection between trivia and books makes a lot of sense as a good trivia player is usually also an avid reader. Therefore balancing out books of trivia platers is only natural.

This special promotion is taking place today (Nov 17th) between 9pm and midnight EST, and you can find all the details about it on their promotions page.

Yours,

Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: a great green gift for the holidays!

Eco-Libris is collaborating with BookSwim on a special holiday gift card program

Eco-Libris is happy to announce on a new collaboration, this time with BookSwim, the premier online book rental service.

BookSwim launched yesterday a Holiday Gift Card Program to sponsor the planting of holiday evergreen trees with the help of Eco-Libris. For every online gift card purchased at BookSwim.com during the 2007 holiday gift season, BookSwim promises the planting of a new Holiday evergreen tree with Eco-Libris.

BookSwim, established June 2006, is the first full-service online paperback and hardcover book rental library club allowing subscribers to rent books shipped directly to their door with no late fees and free shipping.

The company is based in Monroe, NJ but offers book rental service nationwide ranging from hardcover new release novels to classics, nonfiction bestsellers to children's books.

Book club subscription plans range from under $15 to $36 per month and allow up to 11 books borrowed out at a time and returned in a pre-paid bag, but members are also given the option to buy.

George Burke, chief marketing officer, explains the idea behind the gift card: "book rental gift cards make great last minute gifts for parents, for seniors who may not be able to make it to the bookstore or library, kids who need a constant supply of fresh books, and of course friends and coworkers. And now, the Holiday gift giver can be proud of the dual nature of the honorable gifts of both reading and replenishing nature."

You are welcome to check it out at BookSwim's website.

Yours,

Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: a great green gift for the holidays!

A special green offer for readers of Oprah's Book Club new selection

I read yesterday on USA TODAY on Oprah Winfrey's book club new selection - The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. This is a great book and a great choice!

Eco-Libris believes that this 973-pages book should not be only a celebration of a great book and the joy of reading, but also an opportunity to discuss the urgent need in sustainable reading, which does not harm the environment. I read in the article that New American Library has printed 612,000 new "deluxe" Oprah editions. That's a lot of paper and a lot of trees that are cut down for this special edition.

Eco-Libris aims to raise the awareness to the environmental impacts of using paper for the production of books and for the need in printing books in an eco-friendly manner.

Therefore, we are having a special offer for all the eco-conscious readers out there that want to buy the new edition of the book:

If you buy the book and you want to help the environment, please send us an email to info@ecolibris.net with your address and the first sentence of Chapter 4 (just to show us you bought the book..). Eco-Libris will balance out the book for the first 50 people who email us with the right sentence.

It means that one tree will be planted by our planting partners to balance out the paper used for the book. And we will send you our sticker made of recycled paper saying “One tree planted for this book” you can later proudly display on the book's sleeve showing your commitment to the environment. And yes, we'll send it in an envelope made of recycled paper.

We truly hope to see Oprah's book club assist in promoting sustainable reading in the same way it helped with a great success to promote reading.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: a great green gift for the holidays!

Eco-Libris is featured on TreeHugger's 2007 Gift Guide

TreeHugger published yesterday its 2007 Gift Guide for the upcoming holidays.

The guide is full with great ideas for gifts to many different types of people - from the outdoors lover to the person who has everything. Each type is also devided to three shades of green (light, medium and dark) to make it easier to fit the right green gift to for everyone on your gift list.

One of the great ideas on the guide is.. Eco-Libris. Yep, we're proud to be featured in TreeHugger's guide. We are offered as one of the (medium) green gift options for the geeks and more specifically for the book geeks.

Here is the recommendation:

Ecolibris (book geek)
For the book geek on your list, Eco-Libris helps readers to put something back for all their bookworm pleasures. They figure that 20 million trees meet their demise for each year of US book sales; to get those trees growing they've teamed with three conservation groups to keep the world's forests going strong. TH Link Product Link

I can definitely agree that we will be a perfect fit for the book geeks on your list, or any other eco-conscious reader (not only geeks..) you have there that loves books and also wants to help the environment.

We hope to see many people go green this holiday season with Eco-Libris. We're soon going to offer more options for the holidays, such as gift certificates and sending our stickers with a beautiful greeting cards made of recycled paper as a unique and affordable green gift.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: a great green gift for the holidays!

And the winner of the People's Choice Award is:

I hope you all remember Co-op America's 2007 People's Choice Award for the Green Business of the Year.

We ran here an unofficial guide to the award, where we presented all the final 10 nominees. Last Saturday, the winner was announced in the San Francisco Green Festival:

ReusableBags.com

Congratulations to ReusableBage.com. It's a great green business and it definitely deserves the award.

Co-Op America reported in its newsletter on the winner's response to the exciting news:

"Our ongoing mission since day one has been to change the status quo of society's use-and-toss mentality by providing sound, practical ideas and products," says Vincent Cobb, founder of ReusableBags.com. "We were thrilled to be nominated the past two years, and are incredibly honored to win this year's award."

San Francisco is clearly the place to give the award to ReusableBags.com, as it is the first (and for the best of my knowledge the only) city in the US where plastic bags are banned. I hope many cities and states will follow SF's leadership and will act to finish the destructive addiction to plastic bags. ReusableBags.com is the place to see the alternatives to plastic bags and to learn how easy it can be to go green when it comes to our shopping bags.

For those of you who didn't have the chance to read the on ReusableBags.com in our guide, you can find it here.

Yours,
Raz

Eco-Libris: a great green gift for the holidays!