The "Content"ious Book (hopefully in the style of David Foster Wallace)

Reading is such an enjoyable hobby. Those hours spent snuggled up reading magical stories and engaging in the lives of heroes. You can travel anywhere in those stories, and often times, they are much better than reality. Just the sight of books shelf after shelf in the library can make toes curl.

Because of how much paper is used.

Just imagine how many books are in your local library. There are about 18,000. Think about how many pages there are in 18,000 books. There are a lot. Assuming that there are approximately 250 pages in the average book[i], that would make about 4,500,000 sheets of paper per library. The average tree produces around 8,333 sheets of paper. So basically, a lot of trees are cut down to make books. When lots of trees are cut down, another woodland animal loses its home and dies. Think about all the squirrels whose dreams you’re crushing. Literally. [ii]

With new technological advances these days, there are many more ways to still be able to read a variety of literature without having to keep killing trees. About 85% of American households own computers. Guess what computers can do- access the Internet. Hence, if you can go on the Internet, you could always check out E-books online or read books in PDF files. There are many more ways to access a wider range of literature without the use of books. Instead, books and such can be recycled to be made into paper that people can reuse over and over. Paper production could diminish drastically, reducing the need to deforest the world. Because at the rate that we’re going through forests at, soon there won’t be enough land for us to even live on to read books. Would you compromise books for your life? Yes, of course.

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[i] Most childrens stories are 20 pages long but young adult novels like Twilight are 500 to 800 pages long, which is about 500 to 800 pages too many. I mean, the whole series itself is 2458 pages long and over 120 million books were produced. That’s over 294,960,000,000 total pages of book produced for this series alone, which in my opinion is a waste of paper.

[ii] Althought, I wouldn’t really mind having the forest from Twilight cut down. It might actually be more beneficial to the world.

We don't need this.

But we do need this.