How about reduce before recycle? E-books, if you want, but only print if it's really worth it. Like in the days when each book represented a monk's lifetime. You didn't mess around writing rubbish back then.

If I share initials with 'Global Warming', is that a sign?

I have no experience of e-books, but from what I have heard about them, they do not sound very attractive.  It is not impossible that I might end up liking them, actually.  But at present I have no opinion.

On the other hand, there can be no doubt that real books are the best kind of "information-retrieval system" (as librarians would put it) ever invented.

On recycled paper in publishing: Manufacturing paper, to be used in countless applications, is an old and complicated technology.  Several kinds of paper are typically used in a single book: not just for the pages, but also for the end papers, the dust jacket, and for the cover itself.  Probably it was obvious early on to the paper manufacturers and publishers that recycled fibers could be readily used for some of these applications, but less so for others.  Hopefully the technology will continue to progress, and recycled fibers will be found to be more and more adaptable.  Probably the website advertising to the left of the screen, dalumpapir.dk, has a lot of relevant information.

And yes, I shall indeed be in line at the Bank Street Bookstore, late on the 20th, to pick up my copy of Harry Potter 7.  Back in 2005, in the line waiting for Harry Potter 6, I was the sole grown-up unaccompanied by a child, and had a lot of fun asking the kids around me who they thought the Half-Blood Prince would turn out to be.  This time, I am going to have to come up with something brighter than the obvious question, "Do you think Harry dies at the end?"

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

A drop in the bucket, perhaps. But certainly better than accruing, oh say, cheap plastic junk from Wal-mart, no?

Of course, it was a great deal of fun.  I wish I had brought Little White Dog with me, actually; there were a few other dogs there, after all.  But then again, maybe she would have been scared, what with the crush, and I would have ended up holding her the whole time, which might have interrupted some very interesting conversations, or at least shifted their direction, she being so supremely cute and the obvious center of attention.

As opposed to the wait for HP 6 a couple of years ago, this time the line was easily twice as long, and wound around two corners.  Also, there were many more grown-ups without children.  I was standing in front of a plainly learned woman, from the looks of the complicated puzzle she was working on, who agreed with me that the third volume of the series is the best, and the fourth overlong.  She had seen the new "Goblet of Fire" movie; and, when I asked a question that I have been worrying about, as a dog with a bone, "What in the world does a movie-maker do with the thestrals, magical animals whom some characters can see but others cannot, and among those who cannot see them, three of them are obliged to ride them the long distance from Hogwarts to London?," she revealed no movie-spoilers (of course I know the story already), but only said, "Well, it sort of works."

I chatted longer with the pretty young couple waiting in front of me in line, he a Brit who is clearly not the HP type, which is fine, he seemed very happy to indulge us HP fans; she, on the other hand, works for Random House, in the audio-book division, and said she has often met with the English actor who narrated the HP books for them.  Both of them were of the kind that one meets so rarely nowadays, the kind that knows how to show respect to their elders.

The dynamics of the line were unpredictable and difficult to manage, but I managed to ask the young Random House woman, just before we parted, what she thought of the acclaim that Scholastic has received for publishing HP 7 with recycled materials, and claiming that this publication is carbon-neutral.  (And of course I mentioned the coverage of the matter in Grist.)  She said that yes indeed, publishers are seriously paying attention to this, including her employer Random House, one of the world's biggest, and are beginning to go greenward: not so much because they want to do that themselves, but because more and more of their consumers are demanding it of them.

Well, that is good news, I suppose.  What I am privately thinking, however, is, that with a book like HP 7, I was going to buy it regardless, so what kind of consumer pressure was somebody like me going to exert?  And in general, lots of us are simply hooked on reading new books, for one reason or another, and lots of us will buy them regardless of how they are printed, if they are must-reads and must-haves.  Therefore, any greenification of the publishing industry that has taken place thus far, especially in the carbon-neutral publication of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" and now of HP 7, seems to depend on the good will of principled decision-makers, not on matters related to markets and consumers.

So, where do we go from here?

At least the National Wildlife Federation sent around yesterday a form-message for us to edit and send along, to be sent to Scholastic, to thank them for their leadership in publishing a green HP best-seller.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.