Three new children's books published by Pick-a- Woo Woo go green with Eco-Libris!

We are happy to announce a new collaboration with our partner, the Australian publishers Pick-a-Woo Woo, on not one, not two, but three new children's books they're publishing now!

We started working with Pick-a-WooWoo last October to green up children's books they publish by planting trees. We began with 625 trees planted for "The Boy Who Was Born To Love Frogs" and now we continue with planting 625 trees planted for "Angel Steps", 625 trees for "Oceans Calling" and 825 trees for "KC the Conscious Camel".

This brings us to a total of 2,475 new trees planted on behalf of Pick-a-Woo Woo!

Based in Western Australia, Pick-a-Woo Woo Publishers are publishers of Mind Body Spirit books for children. Their inspirational books are designed to help children connect with their intuition and inner guidance, develop their awareness skills and enhance their Mind, Body, Spirit connection.

Here are more details on the three new books:





















Angel Steps

About the book:

Love You, Miss You. Through five easy steps Paris learns how to call upon Archangel Gabrielle ...the Angel of messages. Paris wishes to share with her Nana, how much she still loves and misses her. Paris is overjoyed when Nana, in return, gives her some very special messages.

"Angel Steps sensitively illustrates the process used to heal, comfort and send a message of love"

Author: Lidija Pretreger
Illustrator: Carolyn Maree Rose





















Ocean's Calling

About the book: An enlightening journey to the lost city of Atlantis.

Filled with the ancient knowledge of colour and crystal healing, this beautifully illustrated story follows the journey of a young girl who meets blue dolphins and a magical mermaid. Deep beneath the waves, they find a hidden city where they discover a secret which helps them to heal the ocean. Both children and adults will want to immerse themselves in this timeless underwater adventure.

Author: Jacqueline Nicholl
Illustrator: Gabriel Evans

KC the Conscious Camel

About the book:

When K.C.'s dear friend, Sticky the Pig, is ridiculed by the class bully, Ginger the Red Fox, for an unfortunate mud puddle incident, KC shares with Sticky the tools to owning an emotion and then moving beyond it. KC demonstrates the need for acting instead of reacting. Throughout the day, the precocious camel points out opportunities for he and his friends to tune in to their inner peace, joy, and unconditional love. KC shows them how to stay connected to these productive and positive emotions through meditation.

KC and his classmates ultimately demonstrate to their teacher and to each other that they are capable of complex spiritual evolution...and a harmonious day on the playground!

Author: Suzanne McRae
Illustrator: Alexander Mortimer

More information on these books and other titles published by Pick-a-Woo Woo can be found on their website - http://www.pickawoowoo.com

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!

Will we have a federal subsidies for green printing?

Well, it might be. What used to be only a fantasy of few is becoming an actual plan .

Frank Locantore reported on Better Green Project that "c (PBO) will announce plans to introduce legislation in the US Congress that will allow companies to receive refunds from state sales tax as a reward for purchasing environmentally responsible print projects."

This announcement is going to take place this month (July 19-20) at the Print Oasis 2010, which is a print buyers conference and exhibit. Now, at first it sounded strange to me - regulation that will support green printing? But in second thought, why not? I mean, so far the green printing market is based on voluntary initiatives of companies and printers, but if that's a lesson we can learn from other green markets, it's that voluntary initiatives are fine and can change things to some degree, but to see a real change, we need a regulation that will back it up and provide adequate incentives to do the right thing.

According to Suzanne Morgan, President and Founder of PBO, who introduced this initiative in an email last month, "this legislation proposes that any print project that is bought in an environmentally sustainable way is eligible for refunds of state sales taxes by the Federal government."

The most interesting question to me (and others as you can read on tree dead edition) would be what would be the standards a printing project will need to meet to be eligible for the refund. Ms. Morgan's email doesn't go too much into details (it promises that the exact legislation is very achievable and will be presented in detail on July 19, 2010 ), but it implies that the standards can be recycled, include 15% or more PCW, are printed on paper that is legally harvested, etc.

Given that the minimum post-consumer waste content required by the EPA for uncoated papers is 30% (it's 10% for coated paper), 15% sounds a bit low. It would be also interesting to see if there will be a mention of FSC certification and chlorine usage, which are also crucial elements.

I guess we'll have to wait for July 19 and see. In any case I believe POB deserves big kudos for their efforts. If regulation can support and incetivize green buildings, green cars, green energy and many other green products and services, why not green printing??

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: promoting green printing!

Sell Your Mobile For The Best Price With SellMyMobile.com

Today we have a guest column from our friends at Sell My Mobile who present the important green service they provide - a mobile phone recycling price comparison site.

Mobile phone recycling is still a fresh new idea of earning yourself some extra cash, and people across the world are still very much unaware to the potential that is behind this new money earning arrangement.

If you have any old mobile phones lying around the house, no matter how old or cosmetically damaged they are, then now is a great time to trade them in for a cash return, and the course of action couldn’t be any easier to send them off to the recyclers. Sell My Mobile compare all the UK’s leading mobile phone recycling companies to give you the greatest price viable on your phone, saving you time and money from having to physically make notes of each company’s quoted cost.

The process of selling your phones for cash is clear-cut and will only take you a few minutes to finalize. Using the succeeding four steps can see you receive your cash within a couple of days and with payout of up to £350 your phone could be worth a lot more than you suppose.

1. Search for your mobile phones model in the search box provided
2. A list of results will be displayed giving you a range of prices with the best price displayed at the top with the phone recycling company that will offer it you.
3. Visit the company website that offers you the best price and fill in your details. You will then receive an email with instructions on how to send your phone away (freepost)
4. You will receive a cheque in the post within 1 – 3 days on average.

Why Choose SellMyMobile.com To Sell Your Old Mobiles?

• We currently compare over 30,000 prices on over 4,000 phones everyday – and currently have the best search comparison engine in the market
• The original and the best! - SellMyMobile.com was the 1st mobile phone recycling price comparison site in the UK
• 147,000 visits per month
• Comprehensive comparison table identifying phone recycler payment methods, best prices offered and freepost options.
• On average 650 phones are sold per day on Sell My Mobile
• 68 million phones are lying around in people’s homes, unused
• The most valuable phone to recycle/sell is the Apple iPhone 3G S 32GB, which can be sold for £302 (May 2010).

In conclusion you are not spending a penny when you recycle mobile phones with Sell My Mobile, yet you’re acquiring additional money to put towards a luxury or unpaid bill, plus you are helping out the environment that we live in.

To E Or Not To E? Litopia After Dark is hosting me on the net’s foremost literary salon

Yesterday I had the pleasure to be the special guest on Litopia After Dark, the net’s foremost literary salon, in a show that was entitled 'To E Or Not To E?'.

The show is available now online and you can listen to the show at http://radiolitopia.com/enclosures/lad/lad_123.mp3

It was my second time on this great show that is hosted by Peter Cox and it was so fun! Here are more details about the show (from Litopia's website):

How green is your e-book? How much do you care about the environmental impact of the words you read… or about the sweatshop workers who assembled your shiny new iPad? Tonight’s special guest is Raz Godelnik from Eco-Libris - the organization that encourages readers to do something to make the world greener – and he’s got some surprising facts about the relative impact of e-readers compared to paper books.

Still on an iTheme, Dave Bartram proposes the notion that technology is changing the way we think and making it harder for us to concentrate on one thing at a time… such as reading. “Reading on my iPhone sucks”, says Dave. “It’s not immersive enough… and it’s far too easy to be distracted.” If this is true, the publishing industry hasn’t even begun to consider what impact this may have on our reading, and writing, habits.

It’s Donna Ballman’s last appearance for a few weeks – she’s off for a highly-merited vacation, and we’ll miss her while she’s gone. She’s leaving us with five habitual lies that authors tell themselves!

And Eve Harvey has picked up on one of Litopia’s own tweets – what makes writers particularly susceptible to the demon drink? Is it cause – or effect? Do some people actually write better while inebriated? If he had not become such a drunk, would Truman Capote have finished Answered Prayers? And if he did – would it have been any good?

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!

Echo Train, a new collection of poems by Aaron Fagan, is going green with Eco-Libris!

Eco-Libris is collaborating with many authors publishing a variety of literary genres, but we never had the chance to work with an author who is publishing poetry book. Not any more!

We are very happy to announce a new collaboration with author Aaron Fagan on his new poems book 'Echo Train'. A tree will be planted with Eco-Libris for every copy printed!

Fagan's new collection of poems is published with Salt Publishing. It follows two other collaborations we have with Salt authors - Elizabeth Baines (whom we just hosted in her book tour promoting Too Many Magpies) and Tania Hershman.

About the author: Aaron Fagan was born in Rochester, New York, and raised in Victor. He was educated at Hampshire College and Syracuse University where he specialized in poetry. He moved to Woodlawn in the Bronx in 2006 and was a copy and research editor for Scientific American magazine. Harold Bloom said his first collection of poems, Garage (Salt Publishing, 2007) was "vivid and aesthetically disturbing work" and that "his promise is considerable because his originality should prove to be decisive."

About Echo Train: Echo Train begins "Once upon a time / Books began this /Way" and asks us not “to be shocked to find / We must return and /Stand for what we are” when we reach the book’s end. Readers who said they tend to avoid poetry altogether sat down with the intention of
reading one or two poems and found themselves reading it all the way through in a single sitting.

More information on the book, including podcasts of poems and an excerpt from book can be found on Salt Publishing's website (where you can also purchase a copy of it).

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!

Barnes & Noble is expecting to generate $3-$5 billion from e-books sales in 2013 - is it realistic?

Yesterday, Barnes & Noble, the world's largest bookseller, reported sales and earnings for its fiscal 2010 fourth quarter and full year ended May 1, 2010.

The report is full with interesting data, but one piece of information that caught my eye was that B&N Chief Executive William Lynch said that Barnes & Noble expects to have about 25% of the digital book market by 2013, providing the bookseller with the opportunity to boost revenue by $3 billion to $5 billion.

Now, I think 25% market share may be a bit optimistic, but let's leave it aside for a moment and assume Lynch is right. I still wonder how exactly he came up with the estimate of e-books sales between $3 billion and $5 billion by 2013 - if we take into account their estimated market share (25%), it means that we talk about a $16 billion e-book market in 2013 (in average).

Given that the total books market generates now about $20 billion in sales and that the estimated market share of e-books, which is currently around 5%, is expected to be around 25% in a couple of years, I think that Lynch's estimate of $3-$5 billion in sales is very far from being realistic.

What do you think about this estimate? I'll be happy to hear your thoughts about it.

More related articles:
Is there a future for Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores? Is it a green one?, Eco-Libris Blog

E-Books Rewrite Bookselling, The Wall Street Journal

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!

Green chat with Elizabeth Baines on the final stop of her virtual book tour for 'Too Many Magpies'

We are always happy to be part of virtual book tours of authors we work with, and today we have the pleasure to be the last stop in the virtual tour of Elizabeth Baines to promote her great book 'Too Many Magpies'.

Elizabeth is collaborating with Eco-Libris to plant a tree for every copy printed of the book. She will also be planting a tree for every copy printed of "The Birth Machine", which will be reissued by Salt Publishing on October 2010. This is also an opportunity to remind you of two other gifted authors who publish with Salt and partner with us - Tania Hershman and Aaron Fagan.

Elizabeth's tour started on May 6th at Sue Guiney's blog and since then had another seven stops in very interesting destinations (check out the tour's webpage for the full list) and we're the ninth and last stop. Since we collaborate with Elizabeth to green up her books, we decided to have the interview more focused on the green side of both her and the book. We hope you'll enjoy it.

First, here's some background on the author and the book:

Elizabeth Baines was born in South Wales and lives in Manchester. She is the prizewinning author of prose fiction and plays for radio and stage. Too Many Magpies was published by Salt in 2009. Previously Salt published her collection of short stories, Balancing on the Edge of the World (2007) which was pronounced 'a stunning debut collection' (The Short Review). In October 2010 Salt will reissue her first, acclaimed novel The Birth Machine. She is also a performer and has been a teacher. t

About the book:
How do we safeguard our children in a changing and dangerous world? And what if the greatest danger is from ourselves? A young mother fearful for her children's safety falls under the spell of a charismatic but sinister stranger. A novel about our hidden desires and the scientific and magical modes of thinking which have got us to where we are now.

And now for the interview:

Hi Elizabeth. We love the idea of virtual book tour as it's also very eco-friendly in terms of carbon footprint. How did you like it? Was it fun?

It's been great fun, Raz. So interesting to see the different things that the hosts have come up with - from probing questions that wrenched my brain to a really fun word association game! The way I think virtual tours win out hands-down over in-person tours is that the audience is potentially so much bigger, and not only that, the visit is a permanent record for anyone to visit at any time.

You're a very eco-conscious writer - why is that and how do you see it reflected in your writing?

I was born in the countryside in South Wales to a family who were closely involved with and passionately interested in nature - some of them were farmers. When I was about nine a power station was built slap-bang on that rural idyll that had been my first home, with loss of some really important wetlands, and it was obvious that the local people, including my family, had been powerless to stop it happening in the face of government decision. I felt a huge sense of grief and later anger, so I guess you could say that at nine years old my political eco-consciousness was born. That scenario appears in my first novel, The Birth Machine (which Salt will reissue in October), and these issues are so much part of me that of course they emerge in my writing all the time.

You plant a tree with Eco-Libris for every printed copy of your books. Do you have other eco-friendly habits you practice in daily life?

I use eco-friendly products and recycle. We have a compost bin. I have an absolute horror, in fact, of throwing things away when they could be somehow used again. I do love clothes, but I hardly ever buy new, and I'm always altering them for the fashions, and when they wear out I cut them up for rags! My husband John and I used to have a car each, but we decided we should only have one. This all sounds very pious, I guess, but it's quite selfish, really, as it's the only way I feel comfortable. And I don't know how I'd feel if I had to do a lot of flying...

When I think about the theme of scientific versus magical thinking, I instinctively think about global warming and how people relate to it in the current debates. How do you see it?

Yes, I think the whole issue of global warming is very much tied up with the issue of magical/scientific thinking. People tend to think of science and magical thinking as opposites, but as I said recently in an interview on the Salt website, while the truly scientific is truly rational and takes account of unknown factors, a lot of magic-wand thinking goes on in scientific/technological practice - an assumption that you can wave a scientific wand and all will be well, a failure to account for possible detrimental consequences of technology - which can lead to environmental disasters.

So we burn fossil fuels for a hundred years and fifty years and send planes up in the air for fifty and assume the atmosphere won't be affected etc... We build nuclear power stations without accounting for nuclear disaster... It's based to some extent in ignorance, and also in a selfish perspective that fails to go beyond the here and now, but it's also a failure of imagination and a childlike, wishful refusal to accept uncertainty.

I see this childlike magical thinking operating in the anti-global warming lobby, the insistence that either global warming is not really happening or that it's not the result of human activities. I accept that we can't conclusively prove that it's the latter, but it seems to me that the only mature response is to take on board the uncertainty and the possibility of our own responsibility...

The theme of nature runs throughout your novel, and I was wondering what's your take on the dissonance between the love many people share to nature and its constant misuse at the same time?

Again, I think this is linked to a certain kind of magical thinking, and it's partly to do with the fact that we've become divorced from nature. We have a romantic longing for nature, but we've lost our understanding of it. We see it as a romantic backdrop for ourselves, yet paradoxically we lose sense of how our activities intimately affect it. So we rush to the rural fishing villages of the world and turn them into acres of multistorey hotels... Romantically we believe that nature will survive whatever, so we drill so deep in the sea that we cause a massive oil spill we can't control...

Would you like to see the book published in other forms such as e-book or audiobook?

Yes, I would love that! For environmental reasons as well as the democratic possibilities. It seems to me that by cutting out the need for printing, transport and warehousing, the life of a book can be extended: books can be made more widely available and for longer. But you'll never stop me loving actual, physical books...

How do you feel about the transition from print to digital? Do you think it will also change the way books are written?

I really find it hard to comment on this. I don't yet have an ebook myself, so I don't even know about that reading experience. And I'm not sure that it would affect the writing experience, anyway. I've heard some writers say they write differently on computers from the way they did with paper and pen (because it's easier to splurge when you know you can so easily cut and paste and so there's a greater freedom) but I and many other writers find that we still have to write our first drafts by hand anyway - for that very reason, that it's too easy to splurge on the computer and then, because it looks so finished, fail to do the necessary editing.

So we're not so sure the changing technology so far has changed the substance of what we write, and I'm not sure that it will be any different when we are writing books for digitization. Although I do think that the internet and the way it favours brevity has already affected prose style: I think we favour economy in prose fiction now far more than we did, and I'm certainly more aware than ever of the need to achieve it while I'm writing.

And what about bookstores? Do you think they could survive in the digital age?

Again, it's another unknown, I think. Current trends would indicate that bookstores will die, but then who is to say that the rise of digital literature won't give rise to a new alternative market in beautifully printed books the point of which would be physical properties that you could only experience before buying in a bookshop?

Can you tell us what you're working on now?

I'm working on a kind of family saga about memory and forgetting, as well as on a new collection of stories around the theme of uncertainty (of course!)

Last but not least, I'm curious if you're a football fan in if you follow your team on the World Cup?

Oh, no, I'm not a football fan, I'm afraid! Well, not in the usual sense. I do like the camaraderie in the pubs at the moment, though...

Thank you, Elizabeth!

If you want to learn more about 'Too Many Magpies', please check the following links:

Flying with Magpies tour page: http://www.e.baines.zen.co.uk/Flyingmagpies.htm

Elizabeth Baines' podcast readings on the Salt blog: http://blog.saltpublishing.com/2009/10/05/listen-to-elizabeth-baines-too-many-magpies/

The Salt web page for the book from which extracts can be copied: http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smf/9781844717217.htm

Links to reviews of the book are in the sidebar on Elizabeth Baines' blog http://elizabethbaines.blogspot.com

A film of Elizabeth Baines talking about the novel:



Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!