Posts Tagged In the News

Green Car Company teammate Frances Ingraham wrote in our June newsletter about some of the green highlights of Amazon’s Kindle e-reader, most notably that it “requires 67 times less water and 140 times less CO2 to produce than printed newspaper; and books use even more water!” There’s lots of analysis out there about how green the Kindle is, but there is a bigger idea behind the “greenness” of the Kindle: digital distribution is green distribution.

Many of you probably have purchased music off of iTunes (or some other online source). This means that you did not buy a physical CD. You didn’t buy that plastic case with the paper booklet that was shipped from somewhere to arrive at the store where you didn’t buy it. Maybe you didn’t buy the physical CD off the internet, which means you didn’t have it shipped, via truck or plane, to arrive at your home. Your digital purchase cut out the production and transportation of a physical object.

Almost ten years ago I was eager to jump on the NetFlix bandwagon: why wouldn’t you want unlimited DVD rentals delivered to your mailbox? Well, now NetFlix, and a few others, offer digital rentals. You pay for the rental, but instead of driving to the store to pick it up, you simply download it. It saves you time, and it reduces not only the number of trips by car to the rental shop, but also the need for a physical DVD to be produced and shipped to that rental shop.

Sure, it will take a bigger cultural shift to get more people relying on digital distribution. Even though you can get digital CD booklets with your music purchase on iTunes, there is still that happy feeling of having the physical CD case in your hand. Even though the Kindle reads nicely and can hold way more than you can possibly read, holding a book still has a nostalgic feeling. Those sort of intangible perks of physical objects are perhaps the biggest obstacle to digital “green” distribution.

To help you get started on the green distribution path, here are a few sources to check out:

• Books: Amazon Kindle, eBooks.com, Plastic Logic (coming soon!), and Cool-er eReader.
• Music: iTunes, Amazon Music, eMusic.com.
• Movies: iTunes, Netflix (if you stream online), Blockbuster Online, Amazon Video on Demand.