I just found out about an online green living bookstore dedicated to providing quality educational materials with minimal environmental impact. With the rate of books we go through in our house, anytime I can get a digital version, I choose to download instead of getting a paper copy.
With global paper consumption increasing at a staggering rate, and forests disappearing overnight, our society really needs to look at ways to decrease our rate of consumption. One online company is focused on giving you an option when buying books for yourself or your kids.
EcoBrain makes it a point to only offer digital downloads, which are available to read on your computer or handheld. With eBooks, you can search the text or copy and paste, and printing of individual pages, or the entire book if necessary, is an option. eBooks have no fuel usage or carbon emissions from printing and shipping, helping to conserve our resources and environment. You’ll save money as well, with prices of eBooks 30% cheaper than print.
eBooks are probably never going to catch on for bedtime stories, but for older kids, study guides, workbooks and activity books as digital downloads makes sense. For homeschoolers or kids with a huge appetite for learning, the selection of books on EcoBrain will help add to their environmental education. Right now, they are offering a line of study guides at 50% off, plus some freebies.
For parents, I recommend:
- The Green Parent: Your Kid-Friendly Guide to Earth-Friendly Living
- EcoKids: Raising Children Who Care for the Earth
- The Natural Child: Parenting from the Heart
- Above All Be Kind: Raising a Humane Child in Challenging Times
For kids, see these educational products:
- Botanical Leaf and Identification Cards
- Crystals in Focus
- Insect Field Journal
- Trees, Leaves and Seeds: A Craft Unit about Trees, Leaves and Seeds
If you’re thinking about buying books on green living, environmental education, or workbooks and study guides for your child, you need to go check out EcoBrain.
Authors take note:
EcoBrain knows it isn’t always easy to get published. And the costs can be staggering. But by publishing in an eBook format, new publishers can produce and publish their material much more quickly, cheaply and profitably. Publishers who are going green can and should be rewarded for their efforts by earning more, while reducing both their own costs and environmental costs as well. EcoBrain makes it possible for publishers to get the green word out in a cost effective and environmentally friendly manner!
More Eco-Books:
Gotta pay this one forward onto Shaping Youth, Derek…great find. In fact, I just did a ‘brain’ post about how I tested out as having ‘naturalistic intelligence’ in the eight main spheres of MITA brain-based learning for education. Here’s my post about it on Shaping Youth. Wonder how you’ll test out?
(I thought for sure my writing/linguistics/verbal skills would be my strong suit…el wrongo…heavy duty on the ‘naturalistic’ front!
Oddly enough, the PhDs at MITA had already tabbed me as same: http://www.shapingyouth.org/blog/?p=2071
Enjoy the quiz! It’s fun, actually…and great bonding to do with kids! Thanks for this book lead!
Great post! EcoBrain is a great company with some great books on ecology and environmentalism in their catalog of titles.
it’s a nice enough idea, and with developments, it might become viable some day. Right now I’m going to continue to buy physical books because there is a tactile component to reading rather than just a collection of text. Don’t forget that there are very well done art books that use paper very respectfully as well as print on demand initiatives that reduce overproduction and storage costs.
Those initiatives have longterm success, but, unfortunately, the market is driven by what is readily available and can be moved.
Another moment for hesitancy is how would independent booksellers, who many authors credit as a huge component of their success and movement into the mainstream, be able to compete with the cornucopias of formats, readers and technology for accessing texts as you suggest? It seems a kiss of death to a significant buy local champion.