t's not new that millions of trees are cut down to meet the current world's demand of paper. Actually even with computers around, tendencies point to an increase instead of a decrease. Very affordable printers and the high volume of sales of digital cameras each year (thus printing of pictures) is making the paper industry meet the highest point in paper manufacturing in the whole history of mankind. Back in the 80's when the first PC's where being shipped to the world, we all thought we wouldn't bee needing paper anymore, that everything would be read on screen of the computers, later on, at the end of the 90's we thought that with email and the internet, the extinction of paper use would be for real but we were wrong again. We like to touch and feel books even with e-books around.



Millions of e-books are sold each year, the info-product industry is growing, the low cost production of e-books and the instantaneous delivery to any part of the world make it very attractive, but there's still one problem: We don't like to read from the computer screens because it causes eye-strain. Doesn't matter how recent your monitor is, the backlight inside it is the equivalent to spend hours looking at a light bulb. The solution? E-ink technology.

E-ink works similarly to the screen of calculators but with higher resolution and quality. Electronic readers with this technology such as Amazon's Kindle and Sony's PRS-505 provide the user with a modern way to read e-books. You can download e-books from your computer to the PRS-505 or from amazon's store directly to your kindle and read from the screen of the device itself without eye-strain as it has no backlight, it is also very portable as it has the size of a paperback.

The storage capacity is enormous. You can have more than a thousand books in the PRS-505 (consider it like an ipod for books) and the battery lasts for thousands of page turns (yes, battery is consumed only when you turn the virtual pages). This could be the real solution to the big deforestation problems and world climate changes. The current limitations in the PRS-505 are the ones that involve the format of e-books. Currently the letter-sized e-books you have in your computer in .pdf format are incompatible with the PRS-505 due to the difference in screen sizes. There is a practical way to format your e-books and documents for the PRS-505 and this is by using the software Michelangelo: the formatter for the PRS-505 and PRS-500. This PRS-505 formatter works very smoothly and nicely to give shape to your documents and e-books. Studens and professionals from all industries can use the PRS-505 formatting software to have their documents and learning materials in one place. Just imagine how much space it would save in a backpack or a briefcase.

Technology has deteriorated the environment and it could be the only way to save it. Think about getting an e-reading device and you will make a change.