Earth Day 2011 - 41 Reasons to Plant a Tree for Your Book: Reason no. 25

We continue with our Earth Day campaign - 41 Reasons to Plant a Tree for Your Book, where we share with you 41 reasons provided by readers in celebration of the upcoming 41st anniversary of Earth Day!

With more than 180,000 trees planted so far on behalf of readers, authors and publishers working with Eco-Libris, it's no surprise that we think planting trees to green up books is a great idea.. But we also want to hear what readers think about it and why they believe planting trees for their books is a good idea.

So for 41 days until Earth Day, we publish here the 41 best replies we receive, one reply a day. All replies are gathered and presented on the Earth Day 2011 page.

Reason no. 25:
Because we need more oxygen for the growing population on this planet and to help the polluted atmosphere - Susan Newman (who also designed the campaign's logo!)

Thank you Susan for sharing with us your thoughts on planting trees for your books!

Susan, just like all the other readers whose replies we'll publish, is winning one of the great 41 prizes we give away on this campaign, courtesy of our partners. Winners can choose their prize from a great list of gifts including audiobooks from Simon & Schuster Audio (such as The Half Life by Jennifer Weiner, Left Neglected by Lisa Genova and Essence of Happiness by the Dalai Lama) and great books, like Planet Home by Jeffrey Hollender, Spit That Out! by Paige Wolf and The Healthy Home by Dave Wentz and Dr. Myron Wentz. You can see the full list of the prizes on the campaign's page.

Every day we'll give further details on one of the prizes. Today we present you with the book Green Beginnings: The Story of How We Built Our Green & Sustainable Home by Avrim and Vicky Topel.

Green Beginnings: The Story of How We Built Our Green & Sustainable Home by Avrim and Vicky Topel - This book is the first of its’ kind to present the subject matter both experimentally and from a homeowner’s perspective. Using non-technical, easy-to-understand, plain English, the authors identify and define green and sustainable concepts, materials and systems, and explain how these various components come together and relate to each other in today’s green homes.

Their homespun narrative style of storytelling makes readers feel as though they are conversing with two old friends and simplifies learning and comprehension. Following the projects timeline, the authors inject experiential advice at key planning and construction phases when applicable.

Topics include selecting architects, builders and other professionals, the LEED For Homes program, and cite the benefits green homes avail homeowners. Construction activities are illustrated with 100 sequenced color photographs, and a glossary of green and sustainable terms and language provides the reader with a reference guide.

We still have some spots available so please send us your reply to info@ecolibris.net. We look forward to hearing from you.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!

Earth Day Campaign - 41 Reasons to Plant a Tree for Your Book: Reason no. 24

We continue with our Earth Day campaign - 41 Reasons to Plant a Tree for Your Book, where we share with you 41 reasons provided by readers in celebration of the upcoming 41st anniversary of Earth Day!

With more than 180,000 trees planted so far on behalf of readers, authors and publishers working with Eco-Libris, it's no surprise that we think planting trees to green up books is a great idea.. But we also want to hear what readers think about it and why they believe planting trees for their books is a good idea.

So for 41 days until Earth Day, we publish here the 41 best replies we receive, one reply a day. All replies are gathered and presented on the Earth Day 2011 page.

Reason mo. 24:

Planting a tree in honor of the books we create is entirely a selfish decision. For such a small price, the payback for our Earth is enormous…not only do trees provide shade from the sun, a pleasant rustling of leaves in the wind, homes to bugs and birds and mammals, and at the end of their lives new resources for our paper needs, during their lives they provide us with the oxygen our very lives depend upon. As long as we keep producing excessive amounts of carbon dioxide, we depend on nature to right our wasteful ways, and it is our duty to help recreate the forests we have been destroying for centuries.- Penny Eifrig, Publisher, Eifrig Publishing

Thank you Penny for sharing with us your thoughts on planting trees for your books!

We want to mention again the great prizes we give away on this campaign, courtesy of our partners. Winners can choose their prize from a great list of gifts including audiobooks from Simon & Schuster Audio (such as The Half Life by Jennifer Weiner, Left Neglected by Lisa Genova and Essence of Happiness by the Dalai Lama) and great books, like Planet Home by Jeffrey Hollender, Spit That Out! by Paige Wolf, Menu Dating by Tristan Coopersmith and The Healthy Home by Dave Wentz and Dr. Myron Wentz. You can see the full list of the prizes on the campaign's page.

Every day we'll give further details on one of the prizes. Today we present you with the audiobook American Assassin by Vince Flynn:

American Assassin by Vince Flynn - #1 New York Times bestseling author Vince Flynn introduces the young Mitch Rapp on his first assignment, a mission of vengeance that made him a CIA superagent— and a terrorist's worst nightmare.

Two decades after the Cold War, CIA Operations Director Thomas Stansfield must prepare his people for the next conflict. The rise of Islamic terrorism is coming, and it needs to be met abroad before it reaches America's shores. Stansfield directs his protÉgÉe, Irene Kennedy, and his old colleague, Stan Hurley, to form a new group of clandestine operatives—men who do not exist—who will work outside the normal chain of command. Kennedy finds the ideal candidate in the wake of the Pan Am Lockerbie bombing terrorist attack. . . .

Among the thousands of family and friends grieving the victims is Mitch Rapp, a gifted college athlete, who wants only one thing: retribution. Six months of intense training prepare him to bring the war to the enemy's doorstep, and he does so with brutal efficiency, leaving a trail of bodies from Istanbul and across Europe, to Beirut. But there, the hunter becomes the hunted: the enemy has prepared a trap, and the American assassin will need every ounce of skill and cunning if he is to survive the warravaged city and its deadly terrorist factions.

If you want to participate in the campaign, we still have some spots available so please send us your reply, either by adding a comment here or sending it to info@ecolibris.net. We look forward to hearing from you.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!

People who follow Safari Books Online prefer using the iPad for e-reading

I just got some interesting information from Safari Books Online. According to a recent poll they conducted on their blog, eBook readers prefer to use the iPad for e-reading.

Safari Books Online asked participants to select the devices that they use to read eBooks and other online content, 40% of respondents selected the iPad. 691 votes were received, and the full results are included below.

What devices do you use to read eBooks and other online content?

iPad - 40%
Desktop/Laptop - 24%
Smartphone - 19%
Kindle - 13%
Nook - 2%
Other - 2%

These are interesting results because most surveys so far found that the Kindle is the most preferred e-reader. Here are two examples:

Kindle wins e-reader battle versus iPad: survey - "Amazon’s Kindle scored strongly over Apple’s iPad as an e-reader, according to a survey by news navigator One News Page. In a survey of over 1000 US and UK users, almost two thirds preferred Kindle to iPad, though the users admitted the iPad was “more compelling” because of its multi-functionality." (Entertainment & Stars, Sept 2010)

Impact of the Apple iPad vs. the Amazon Kindle on the e-Reader Market - The Amazon Kindle (47%; down 15-pts) is hanging on to a rapidly diminishing lead over the Apple iPad (32%; up 16-pts) among current e-Reader owners. However, the iPad’s share of the overall market has doubled since the last time ChangeWave surveyed e-Reader owners in August." (InvestorPlace, Nov 2010)

The results of Safari are presenting the preferences of the people who follow Safari, which is an on-demand digital library that delivers expert content in both book and video form from the world’s leading authors in technology and business. Still, I wonder if it has also some further meaning, other than just saying that Safari's followers are big fans of Apple's iPad. Is the dominance of the Kindle as the preferred device for e-reading in danger? What do you think? I'll be happy to hear your thoughts.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Working to green the book industry!

Earth Day 2011 Campaign - 41 Reasons to Plant a Tree for Your Book: Reason no. 23

We continue with our Earth Day campaign - 41 Reasons to Plant a Tree for Your Book, where we share with you 41 reasons provided by readers in celebration of the upcoming 41st anniversary of Earth Day!

With more than 180,000 trees planted so far on behalf of readers, authors and publishers working with Eco-Libris, it's no surprise that we think planting trees to green up books is a great idea.. But we also want to hear what readers think about it and why they believe planting trees for their books is a good idea.

So for 41 days until Earth Day, we publish here the 41 best replies we receive, one reply a day. All replies are gathered and presented on the Earth Day 2011page.

Reason mo. 23:

“Writing a book about ‘green guilt,’ I certainly had to do something to assuage my own green guilt about printing books! I tried to publish in the most sustainable fashion available to me, but partnering with Eco-Libris and knowing that a tree was planted for every copy made me feel much better about the publishing process.” - Paige Wolf, author of Spit That Out!: The Overly Informed Parent's Guide to Raising Children in the Age of Environmental Guilt

Thank you Paige for sharing with us your thoughts on planting trees for your book!

We want to mention again the great prizes we give away on this campaign, courtesy of our partners. Winners can choose their prize from a great list of gifts including audiobooks from Simon & Schuster Audio (such as The Half Life by Jennifer Weiner, Left Neglected by Lisa Genova and Essence of Happiness by the Dalai Lama) and great books, like Planet Home by Jeffrey Hollender, Spit That Out! by Paige Wolf, Menu Dating by Tristan Coopersmith and The Healthy Home by Dave Wentz and Dr. Myron Wentz. You can see the full list of the prizes on the campaign's page.

Every day we'll give further details on one of the prizes. Today we present you with the audiobook Bird Cloud by Annie Proulx.

Bird Cloud: A Memoir by Annie Proulx - "Bird Cloud" is the name Annie Proulx gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and four-hundred-foot cliffs plunging down to the North Platte River. On the day she first visited, a cloud in the shape of a bird hung in the evening sky. Proulx also saw pelicans, bald eagles, golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, scores of bluebirds, harriers, kestrels, elk, deer and a dozen antelope. She fell in love with the land, then owned by the Nature Conservancy, and she knew what she wanted to build on it—a house in harmony with her work, her appetites and her character, a library surrounded by bedrooms and a kitchen.

Proulx's first work of nonfiction in more than twenty years, Bird Cloud is the story of designing and constructing that house—with its solar panels, Japanese soak tub, concrete floor and elk horn handles on kitchen cabinets. It is also an enthralling natural history and archaeology of the region—inhabited for millennia by Ute, Arapaho and Shoshone Indians— and a family history, going back to nineteenth-century Mississippi riverboat captains and Canadian settlers.

Proulx, a writer with extraordinary powers of observation and compassion, here turns her lens on herself. We understand how she came to be living in a house surrounded by wilderness, with shelves for thousands of books and long worktables on which to heap manuscripts, research materials and maps, and how she came to be one of the great American writers of her time. Bird Cloud is magnificent.

If you want to participate in the campaign, we still have some spots available so please send us your reply it to info@ecolibris.net. We look forward to hearing from you.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!

Why a Green Strategy Will Help Barnes & Noble Avoid Bankruptcy? Check out my article on Triple Pundit

If you follow this blog for some time, you already know we write extensively on the possibility that Barnes & Noble will follow Borders and file for bankruptcy. We really don't want it to happen, so as I was thinking about ways B&N could avoid bankruptcy, I realized that green strategy might be the solution for B&N.

Why a Green Strategy Will Help Barnes & Noble Avoid Bankruptcy? If you want to know the answer, or at least my thoughts about the answer, you're welcome to read my article about it at Triple Pundit.

Here's the first paragraph of the article:

This is not the best of times for Barnes & Noble. B&N shares have lost about 50% of their value in the last couple of weeks and it doesn’t look like B&N can find a buyer, regardless of the low price. Not surprisingly, there is a growing concern that B&N may eventually follow Borders and file for bankruptcy.

B&N is in a search to redefine its business model. They really don’t have a choice as the traditional brick and mortar bookstores model doesn’t work that well anymore. It’s true they got the Nook, but they also have 705 stores with 18.4 million square feet (not including B&N College stores) they need to transform back into an asset to stay in business.

So here is an idea – how about adopting a green strategy to avoid bankruptcy?

The full article is available at http://www.triplepundit.com/2011/04/green-strategy-barnes-noble-avoid-bankruptcy/

For information and resources please visit the future of bookstores webpage on our website. You're also welcome to check our B&N bankruptcy index.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!

Earth Day Campaign - 41 Reasons to Plant a Tree for Your Book: Reason no. 22

We continue with our Earth Day campaign - 41 Reasons to Plant a Tree for Your Book, where we share with you 41 reasons provided by readers in celebration of the upcoming 41st anniversary of Earth Day!

With more than 180,000 trees planted so far on behalf of readers, authors and publishers working with Eco-Libris, it's no surprise that we think planting trees to green up books is a great idea.. But we also want to hear what readers think about it and why they believe planting trees for their books is a good idea.

So for 41 days until Earth Day, we publish here the 41 best replies we receive, one reply a day. All replies are gathered and presented on the Earth Day 2011page.

Reason no. 22:
We like to Reduce Reuse Recycle whenever we can as a Publisher...not an easy task. So whenever we think PAPER we think along these lines.

P - PAY BACK – Learn to give back to Mother Nature – not just TAKE, TAKE, TAKE (thank you Eco-libris).
A - APRRECIATION - We appreciate the need to be different and show other publishers the way. Even if it means less profit.
P - PLAN – Plan to minimise wastage, minimise paper usage, minimise transport, minimise consumption on each book we print.
E - ENERGY - We appreciate that one reem of paper equals 6% of a tree; 5.4 Kg of Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere... What can we do to reduce Energy and Resources and give back what we have taken?
R - RESPECT – We need to respect the lives of Trees and Ourselves...For without them – we cannot breathe.

Pick-a-WooWoo Publishers (Australia), publishers of great children's books, including KC the Conscious Camel, Angel Steps, Just a Dream, Mr. Now's Magnificent Moment, Archie Angel to the Rescue and many more!

Thank you Pick-a-WooWoo Publishers for sharing with us your thoughts on planting trees for your books!

We want to mention again the great prizes we give away on this campaign, courtesy of our partners. Winners can choose their prize from a great list of gifts including audiobooks from Simon & Schuster Audio (such as The Half Life by Jennifer Weiner, Left Neglected by Lisa Genova and Essence of Happiness by the Dalai Lama) and great books, like Planet Home by Jeffrey Hollender, Spit That Out! by Paige Wolf, Menu Dating by Tristan Coopersmith and The Healthy Home by Dave Wentz and Dr. Myron Wentz. You can see the full list of the prizes on the campaign's page.


Every day we'll give further details on one of the prizes. Today we present you with the book Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food by Paul Greenberg.

Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food by Paul Greenberg - Our relationship with the ocean is undergoing a profound transformation. Whereas just three decades ago nearly everything we ate from the sea was wild, rampant overfishing combined with an unprecedented bio-tech revolution has brought us to a point where wild and farmed fish occupy equal parts of a complex and confusing marketplace. We stand at the edge of a cataclysm; there is a distinct possibility that our children's children will never eat a wild fish that has swum freely in the sea.

In Four Fish, award-winning writer and lifelong fisherman Paul Greenberg takes us on a culinary journey, exploring the history of the fish that dominate our menus---salmon, sea bass, cod and tuna-and examining where each stands at this critical moment in time. He visits Norwegian mega farms that use genetic techniques once pioneered on sheep to grow millions of pounds of salmon a year. He travels to the ancestral river of the Yupik Eskimos to see the only Fair Trade certified fishing company in the world. He investigates the way PCBs and mercury find their way into seafood; discovers how Mediterranean sea bass went global; Challenges the author of Cod to taste the difference between a farmed and a wild cod; and almost sinks to the bottom of the South Pacific while searching for an alternative to endangered bluefin tuna.

Fish, Greenberg reveals, are the last truly wild food - for now. By examining the forces that get fish to our dinner tables, he shows how we can start to heal the oceans and fight for a world where healthy and sustainable seafood is the rule rather than the exception.

We still have some spots available so please send us your reply to info@ecolibris.net. We look forward to hearing from you.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!

Earth Day 2011 Campaign - 41 Reasons to Plant a Tree for Your Book: Reason no. 21

We continue with our Earth Day campaign - 41 Reasons to Plant a Tree for Your Book, where we share with you 41 reasons provided by readers in celebration of the upcoming 41st anniversary of Earth Day!

With more than 180,000 trees planted so far on behalf of readers, authors and publishers working with Eco-Libris, it's no surprise that we think planting trees to green up books is a great idea.. But we also want to hear what readers think about it and why they believe planting trees for their books is a good idea.

So for 41 days until Earth Day, we publish here the 41 best replies we receive, one reply a day. All replies are gathered and presented on the Earth Day 2011page.

Reason no. 21:

The reason that trees should be planted for my book "Planet Earth Gets Well" is because Planet Earth wants very much to have his forests heal and become green again. There is an illustration in the book on Page 11 that shows what happens to forests that have been destroyed by pollution and deforestation. There is nothing that would make Planet Earth happier than to have his forests become lush and green again! - Madeline Kaplan, author of the children's book Planet Earth Gets Well.

Thank you Madeline for sharing with us your thoughts on planting trees for your book!

We want to mention again the great prizes we give away on this campaign, courtesy of our partners. Winners can choose their prize from a great list of gifts including audiobooks from Simon & Schuster Audio (such as The Half Life by Jennifer Weiner, Left Neglected by Lisa Genova and Essence of Happiness by the Dalai Lama) and great books, like Planet Home by Jeffrey Hollender, Spit That Out! by Paige Wolf and The Healthy Home by Dave Wentz and Dr. Myron Wentz. You can see the full list of the prizes on the campaign's page.

Every day we'll give further details on one of the prizes. Today we present you with the book I Unleash Your Full Potential by James Rick.

Unleash Your Full Potential by James Rick - "Unleash Your Full Potential" is the newest book in the "Full Potential" book series, which is the product of James Rick's quest to take thousands of hours of research and distill it into clear, concise, immediately useful information. What began as a desire to have more good days than bad days, and a curiosity about dreams and meditation, evolved into thousands of hours of research and experimentation in the areas of personal development, philosophy, biology, physics, psychology, evolution, religion and spirituality, naturally altered states of consciousness, entrepreneurship, economics, and politics. The broad scope of James' experience and study gives him a unique perspective not usually found in other forms of literature or presentation.

We still have some spots available so please send us your reply to info@ecolibris.net. We look forward to hearing from you.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!