I’ve tried reading Eleanor and Park on my iPad and I think I would have liked it better if it was a book. Electronic books can leave me agitated and sometimes it highlights and selects stuff when I don’t want it to. I’ll try and flip to the next page and I end up flipping past it. Sometimes it’s frozen on the same page! With a real book, nothing like that can go wrong, maybe a ripped page or two, but tape usually fixes that -but if someones a reader they’d usually be careful and make sure that that didn’t happen. With electronic books, sometimes what happens on it is out of the readers control.
Even though sometimes the wind blows the pages or there’s a spot of food here and there, I can’t see books becoming outdated, at least for my generation. The only big problem with it I can see, would be the cutting of trees -but electronics also have their own effects on the environment too. I’d rather just grow back more trees than we cut instead of putting more harsh chemicals into the environment. I know growing back trees shouldn’t have any negative effects, but with chemicals some things might not be reversible.
The picture of this child in China is just one gimpse of e-waste. There are fields of e-waste all over the world. We dump it in poor areas of China, Vietnam, Pakistan, Nigeria and India. What makes this even more tragic is that these people probably haven’t even gotten to see the benefits of electronics and they’re stuck with the ones people threw away. Guiyu is one of the world’s biggest e-waste dumps, with children tested for the levels of lead concentration in their blood. 82% of the children there had lead levels of over 100 in their blood stream. Lead levels that high can have negative affects on a child’s development. Not only will they be paid a few dollars to collect certain items in waste, but they won’t even be able to live up to their full potential.
The internet can help us develop into better, smarter, people too. Without the internet, people won’t know whats going on, on all different sides of the world. However, that doesn’t mean we should buy every electronic device out there. All the average person should need is a cell phone and a laptop and we shouldn’t have to buy anymore than that. We might not be able to stop electronic devices from being dumped, but we can at least slow it down so e-waste doesn’t harm others too much.
If it helps our environment -and other people- I’ll pay for it. More books shouldn’t harm the environiment as long as we give back what we took. I think we should only have the electronics we need and keep them for as long as possible instead of getting the “next best thing” every year. I don’t want a nook, or a kindle, I’m keeping my iPad even though I don’t use it much. I have everything I need to live a good life, and I’m hoping my decision will allow others to have a good life too.