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Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sure more carbon is being used in cutting down the trees to turn into paper, and then shipping all of that paper to customers.
Actually chainsaws are pretty efficient. I say there is no way more "carbon" is used shipping a few thousand books than powering the entire internet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The scenario where paper seems to have a serious advantage over digital is when people disappear or lose interest in maintaining digital copies for a few decades. Paper just sits, relatively inert, in libraries or boxes in peoples attics. Meanwhile, finding a reader for the Jazz disk with your thesis has become impossible.
This is an argument for large-scale backups. If you're already maintaining around 100 TB of assorted backup data, the extra effort of preserving another megabyte of data is negligible, even if you don't consciously care about that particular megabyte. My thesis is in Dropbox, and I emailed it to my GMail address. Both companies seem likely to faithfully back up my thesis for the indefinite future, because it would li…