Eco-Libris Joins Forces With BookMooch

We previously featured Eco-Libris on Life Goggles with an interview with Raz Godelnik. They’ve now teamed up with BookMooch a leading book-swapping site.

BookMooch is an international online community for exchanging used books that has more than 500,000 members who exchange books for free, using a simple points system - every time you give someone a book, you earn a point and can get with it any book you want from anyone else at BookMooch.

Eco-Libris is a green business that works with book readers as well as with publishers, writers, bookstores and other organizations in the book publishing industry to balance out the paper used for printing books by planting trees. Within six months of operation, Eco-Libris has balanced out 10,000 books.

Eco-Libris and BookMooch are partnering now to offer the BookMooch community a special green option - BookMooch members can earn points by planting trees with Eco-Libris. For every 10 books they balance out, they receive a free BookMooch point they can then use to mooch a book for free. They also receive an Eco-Libris sticker made of recycled paper for every book they balance out, saying ‘One tree planted for this book’, which they can display on their books’ sleeves.

The Green Book Product Review

The green book has been featured on TV shows and is a New York Times bestseller. Written by Elizabeth Rogers and Thomas M. Kostigen, I wondered whether it has anything to do with the celebrity quotes and endorsements from people such as Cameron Diaz, Robert Redford, Jennifer Aniston and Justin Timberlake?

Firstly the book is green, not just in colour but also it’s printed on 100% recycled paper. Subtitled as ‘the everyday guide to saving the planet one simple step at a time’ the book is more about being “more good” than “less bad” with a series of nicely structured tips.

Each chapter begins with The Big Picture on the topic, whether it be travel, school or shopping for example. Followed by Simple Steps which provides three practical steps to take in that particular area. Then finally The Little Things provides more details and small steps that can be taken.

Chapters are broken up by the aforementioned celebrity quotes, which frankly don’t add much to the besides to show how big and clever these people are. Some of the tips can be a little confusing or contradictory, such as suggesting you take your own toiletries on vacation, but then not to check any luggage on the plane. Then also to use the library for books and then saying not to use libraries but go online. OK so these are minor points, but some tips are a little picky, I enjoyd the book more when it concentrated on practical measures rather than small, inconvenient suggestions that don’t make much of an impact when done.

What is kind of nice is the comparison it makes for each tip. For example when suggesting if everyone used one less paper napkin a day, the amount saved could be used to provide one to every person who eats a hotdog on July 4th (150m). Or the amount of trash saved is equivalent to the weight of the Great Pyramid. I’ve never seen a plastic frisbee 2.5 miles in diameter but thanks for the image.

The Simple Steps sections are useful, but not full of that much you can’t get for free online anyway, including our very own 100 Ways To Save The Planet. There were some useful facts that you can bring up at parties, like Blu-Ray discs can be recycled as they’re 50% paper, natural make-up only needs to contain 1% natural ingredients to be labeled as natural, and the world’s largest consumer of aluminum is the anti-perspirant industry.

The green book can be bought through our Life Goggles Reviews and Shop page or direct from Amazon.

iChapters Plant A Tree Drive

iChapters is company that sells print and digital textbooks, eBooks and eChapters at a discount. They’re currently running a campaign that will plant a tree for every digital eBook and eChapter purchase through their non-profit planting partner PasoPacifico.org with the Non-Profit Organization ChangingThePresent.org providing the drive accounting and donation processing without charging any handling nor management fee. This offer ends February 15th. For simply writing this review they planted a tree for me so that was nice :).

Their press release states: “In times when environmental issues are a growing concern, and people are looking for simple yet proactive ways to help make a difference, iChapters.com…. announced a month long green campaign aimed at emphasizing conservation, supporting reforestation efforts and reducing the company’s environmental impact by planting trees for every eChapter or eBook purchased through their website…”. Which is a great aim in my opinion!

At the time of writing over 35,000 trees have been planted so it’s obviously going well. They have a facebook page that you can join if you’re so inclined, and will soon have some facebook competitions.

Using the iChapters Website

I had actually never heard of iChapters (perhaps because it’s aimed at school-age students), but I found it easy to use. You can search by title, author, topic or ISBN like you would expect. I browsed the catalog and ran a few searches, there certainly is a lot of topics, apparently they have over 15,000 print, digital and audio tools, as well as online homework solutions such as CNOW, WebCT, and OWL.

I would have liked to be able to sort the results more by name, type, or price as sometimes it took a while to find something I wanted. eChapters start at $1.99, eBooks at $5.99 and text books any price you can think of! Digital downloads are secured with Digital Rights Management (DRM) and while that is only to be expected it’s always a little bit of a pain to begin with.

If you’re buying a textbook or study aid anyway (firstly consider a second hand one if you can!), or eBook then if the price is similar there’s no reason not to buy it from a company that is trying to be environmentally conscious like iChapters.

The End Of Paper Books?

Amazon have just launched their Amazon Kindle, a revolutionary electronic-paper display provides a sharp, high-resolution screen that looks and reads like real paper. Whilst not the first on the market (the Sony Reader being the first that comes to mind), it certainly almost brings electronic book readers into the mainstream.

The Amazon page does a good job of promoting it’s benefits, on the Amazon page are many more videos and you can hear what Neil Gaiman (very interesting) & James Patterson have to say about it. The user reviews are interesting too.

Professional reviews have been mixed, with some thinking it is good or great, and some not so positive.

Pros:
- All your books in one place (well, around 200 books, newspapers or blogs).
- No use of virgin paper and printing inks.
- Little distribution cost.

Cons:
- Initial cost is high, needing a lot of second hand books to cover it.
- You can’t pass a book on.
- Proprietary format books are stored in (you can’t read them on your PC).
- It’s made out of plastic.

Overall my personal opinion is that buying or borrowing used books is better, however it seems that in the future this sort of technology will only become cheaper, easier to use, and more widespread.

A Few Things You Should Never Buy New

Mint is a website that allows users to track different (US) bank accounts in one place online. Not that interesting unless you’re using it, however they do have an interesting blog.

A recent excellent post points out eight things you should not buy new. The site goes into a lot more detail, so is worth reading, but these are:

1. CDs and DVDs
2. Books (see Adam’s posts here and here)
3. Apple Products and Electronics
4. Designer Clothes
5. Baby and Maternity Clothes
6. Games and Toys
7. Homes
8. Cars

Feel free to add any more you think shoud be included by adding a comment below

Feel Better Buying New Books With Eco-Libris (Plus A Special Discount For Readers)

Buying new books is always a joy for me, I love them. In recent years I’ve been better and been buying more and more from charity shops, off eBay and Green Metropolis. However they’re still printed on new paper - very few are printed on recycled material.

Raz Godelnik has recognised this and wants to do something about it. His new company Eco-Libris lets you balance out buying a new book by paying online and getting a tree planted for each book - and a sticker to prove it.

Life Goggles wanted to find out more so contacted Raz and arranged an interview, and he turned out to be very knowledgeable, passionate and eloquent. He even gave us a special offer for Life Goggles readers - balance out 10 or more books and receive a 15% discount until the end of 2007. Click here for more details. Anyway, on with the interview.

Life Goggles: Tell us a little about yourself and where the idea came from?
Raz: I’m the co-founder and CEO of Eco-Libris. I spent a few years in financial management and business development positions and also served as an advisor to the Israeli Minister of the Interior. Afterwards, I co-founded Hemper Jeans (www.hemperjeans.com), an eco-fashion jeans company focusing on producing fashionable jeans made of hemp, and now I’m with Eco-Libris. I also write on green business for the second-largest newspaper in Israel (Maariv).

I live in Newark, DE with my wife Peleg and in my scarce leisure time, I like playing soccer, watch old episodes of Seinfeld and read books.

The idea to establish Eco-Libris started when I was thinking about paper and the environmental impacts of its production. I realized that it might take a while to get to the point where eco-friendly alternatives (from the use of recycled paper to e-books) will replace virgin paper. Then, I talked with some friends about the idea of giving people the opportunity to balance out their paper consumption by planting trees and received good feedback about it.

The decision to focus on books was made after learning that only about 5% of the paper used for printing books is made of recycled paper and because most books don’t have yet an online eco-friendly alternative (e-book), like newspapers and magazines. So, if you want a book, you usually can’t really avoid purchasing a paper-made version of it, unless you go to the library or get it from websites like BookCrossing or BookMooch, which are all excellent choices. You also can’t tell people to stop reading books, so it seemed to me only natural to give book lovers a new alternative to green up their reading - planting trees for the books they read.

Are there other sites doing what you do? How do you differ?
As far as I know we’re the only ones who provide this unique offer. Of course, there are many organizations and websites that offer to plant trees, but we’re more than just about planting trees - we see ourselves as an agent of change that aims to raise awareness, make reading more sustainable and become a voice of all the eco-conscious readers out there, pushing the industry further to be greener and print books in an eco-friendly manner.
[Read more]

Harry Potter Goes Green - Wizard!

Imagine all those Harry Potter books and all those trees! Worry not though because Green Futures reported in its May/June issue that although it took 220,000 mature trees to print the US edition of The Half-Bood Prince in 2005; in 2007 things are much greener. In the US the seventh and final book in the wizarding adventure series has been printed on paper made of recycled fibre and sustainable Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) -certified virgin pulp.

JK Rowling is just one of many environmentally friendly authors. If you want to find out more about them then checkout the Greenpeace book campaign.

Finally, Adam has previously written about Green Metropolis which is a website he uses to buy used books and where you can also sell your old books. In the UK they pay £3 for every book you sell and you can buy most paperbacks for £3.75.

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