Saving Trees, One Leaf at a Time…

I was speaking with Jeremy Greenfield at ABM Top Management last month and we got on the subject about environmental responsibility and how it will continue to be a major force in publishing because it makes both common sense and business sense.

Encouraged by the conversation, we decided to take a harder look at just how "good" digital editions are for the environment. 

We started by looking at all of the page-views we’ve had at Nxtbook since we opened up for business. Then, looked at our ever-increasing run rate per month. From there, we looked at research that shows that only 35% of newsstand copies are actually purchased. And then, from there, we subtracted the fact that while virtual pages appear once on your screen, a real magazine page has two sides. (Other issues like trim and packaging were left out of the equation for now.)

We took this fancy math and handed it over to one of our developers who found a way to quantify that we’ve currently "saved" more than 1.7 billion pages at Nxtbook - over 4,000 trees worth! You can see the counter in action here.

In many ways, an exercise like this is somewhat enlightening and sobering at the same time. While it’s exciting to see the good that we have done, it also points out that - as a growing organization with lots of people - there’s a lot more we could be doing to help the environment. We’ll be looking at some of those issues more closely in the coming months.