Early last year I made a commitment to eliminate all unnecessary dead tree paper reading products from my life.  Books, Newspapers, Magazines were all on the chopping block.

The Enviornment

The average North American consumes 7 Mature Trees worth of paper per year!  The Minneapolis Star Tribune uses an estimated 232544 trees per year.  Thats 232544 trees cut down just so the good people of Minneapolis can get their news in the morning.

This process is being repeated all over the world in cities big and small.  Millions upon millions of trees cut down just so we can read the funnies, and look at over priced real-estate listings every year.

The solution is obvious, switch your dead tree news paper subscription to an online subscription.  Read it on your iPad or Kindle.

Same goes for books.  I have a big pile of books in my house.  I scoured the internet for online PDF versions of these books and found about 70% of them.  I loaded all of these books on to my iPad and backed up in a  couple other places just in case.  I then gave away these books as presents and donations to friends and family.

As for the other 30% I realized I didn’t really care for them that much so I gave those away too.  The only books I kept were my High School Year Books.

Clutter Free Book Shelves – Clutter Free Mind

Junk accumulates fast, once all of your books are gone or at least significantly reduced you will be amazed at the amount of space you have.    Also this has the added psychological effect allowing the mind to be at peace.  By cleaning your environment and ridding it of clutter you will feel better and get more done.

Productivity & Efficiency

Reading on the iPad is a lot faster.  One can skip through and search entire sections instantly.  I’ve read dozens of books and thousands of pages on the iPad.  Its the perfect device for doing it.

For those of you that say “I can’t read on computer screen” you need to wake up and give a modern device like a Kindle or iPad a go.  I’m talking about actually sitting down and trying it out an hour a day for a week.  Then if after that week you still feed me that line about “I can’t read on a computer screen” I won’t judge you.

Digital reading material also allows me to keep my entire library on me anywhere I go.  My iPhone, iPad, iMac, MacBook Air are all synced together so there is no excuse to not study.

Whether I am in the middle of the mall, sitting in a movie theatre waiting for the show to start or queuing in a line somewhere, I have all my material with me.

Make the jump to a digital library, you will thank me for it, but most importantly the Earth will thank you for it.

/Ethan