Librarian in Black Blog – Sarah Houghton

EcoLibris is a new company that plants trees to carbon-balance out for all of the trees that are cut down to create books for people to read.  You can tell it how many books you want to "zero-out" and you pay accordingly to plant the appropriate number of trees (which are planted in developing countries).  10 books = 10 trees = 10 dollars.  You also get EcoLibris stickers to put on your book covers too, to show that you are environmentally conscious about the impact of your reading.   I think this is an interesting idea, but I have a couple of questions:

• Do you only pay for trees for the books you have purchased, which are the ones you are directly responsible for tree-wise?  In other words, do you not buy trees for the books you check out from the library, or the ones you get from friends, or buy second-hand?
• Do you pay for trees for the eBooks you read, as those aren’t printed on paper but do consume electronic resources (power, computers, etc.)?

On the EcoLibris business partnership page, they do ask authors, publishers, and librarians to contact them to find out more information about how the two groups can work together.