It’s really nice that eating simply is also eating very healthfully. By eating simply I mean:

• Lots of vegetables and fruits. As much as possible, organically grown — whether in your own garden or by someone else, the closer to home the better. Produce labeled organic in the grocery stores may have come from far away (even China) and have been picked quite a while ago. Furthermore, there is a significant energy cost Read the rest >>>

Ebooks can be downloaded from a variety of sources around the internet. They are green in that no trees are used in their manufacture. I have been using my background as a librarian to ferret out a variety of ebooks. On this site, I will be writing mainly about green ebooks — that is, ebooks on green topics– so here is some background.

Just as there are online bookstores, there are online ebookstores. For example, here is a link to Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle in four different ebook formats at such a store:

click on eBook

Kingsolver, Barbara – Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

The ebook formats available from this company are:

• The well-known PDF format, for which you need the free Adobe Acrobat reader which comes pre-installed on most computers or other software which will read PDFs.
• Mobipocket, also for use on computers, is free software which you download at mobipocket.com — for Windows, and Mac, Linux, though the last two have to be downloaded manually. Mobipocket files can be read on various small devices such as Blackberry, Palm, Windows Mobile, etc. Usually they cannot be printed out but typically you can copy small segments. This depends on the publisher.
• The Microsoft Reader can be used on computers and portable devices. From the name, I would guess it doesn’t work on Macs.
• Palm software specifically for Palm devices.

Prices: High, Low, and Free

One thing that surprised me when I first started buying and reading ebooks is that sometimes they are more expensive that the corresponding paperback. To stay with the example above, it costs $17.88 or more as an ebook, yet at Amazon the paperback is $10.17 new and a bit less used. I don’t completely understand this but will keep an eye out for why it is that way. It may be a matter of quantities sold. It must be the publishers who decide on the prices, and in one case recently I bought a self-published Mobipocket ebook for $5.00 when the paperback at Amazon was $29.95, so there are exceptions. That was the first time I tried a Mobipocket ebook and I did like it. (Amazon offers the Kingsolver book in Kindle format, its own proprietary ebook format, for $9.99. I am watching the Kindle with interest but have not yet wanted to spend $400 to buy the Kindle reader itself.)

Why would someone spend more for the ebook than for a paperback? Several reasons. Immediacy. Saving a tree. Not having another thing to find a place for. Access if you are located in a country where getting paperbacks in English isn’t simple. (I am frequently in Mexico, and I love downloads partly for this reason.)

There are a number of free ebooks available. I was just at the Mobipocket website and they had a link to a list of free ebooks. The third title on the list was Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 The New York Tunnel Extension of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Meadows Division and Harrison Transfer Yard. Paper No. 1153. I passed on it.

But there are many free PDFs and even text files (.txt) which can be read with Notepad, Word, and other programs. You can cut and paste, take snippets, etc. The best-known collection is at http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/ and it is mostly literature.

Reading on a Computer

While many PDF files can be printed out, others can’t unless the protection is removed. There is software that will do it with older PDF files but I haven’t kept up with the situation currently. So you will be reading on your computer in most cases. Some people say they hate reading on computers, but I must admit I can do it happily for long stretches. I do have a small laptop that I put most of my reading on, and I can relax on the sofa or wherever. I do stop and glance away to keep eyestrain down.

Simple living is a lot of fun.

I don’t think this aspect occurs to people until they have been involved in simple living for a while. Admittedly, going around changing all your light bulbs may not be the most fun you’ve had this week. It has its own rewards, of course, but fun isn’t the main one.
Personally, I like simple living because with fewer possessions and a smaller home to take care of, with a less hectic lifestyle, I have more time.

• More time to write — and for me, a day when I don’t get around to writing is a day with less life in it.
• More time to do my yoga stretches, morning walk, and prayer / meditation.
• More time to play badminton with my husband, in the evening just after the sun goes off the badminton setup in our yard.
• More time to really enjoy my friends… when they slow down enough!
• More time on the phone with my favorite family members, who live thousands of miles away.
• More time to cook from scratch.

More time, more fun…. and the simple green living lifestyle is better for our world.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, her husband and her daughter Camille, is an enjoyable account of a year in the life of this famous novelist and her family, beginning as they leave Arizona for the southern Appalacian mountains of Virginia. They are going to a region where they have family, but even more importantly, to a place where it is possible to grow your own food.

Their concept is to only eat locally for a year.

I found the book fascinating and inspiring. Kingsolver’s ability to write makes me splutter with jealousy.

The book combines information about how food is grown and marketed with their experiences.

And here it is as an ebook

click on eBook

Kingsolver, Barbara – Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Simple living, green living… would you like to do more? Want to live more ecologically, more in harmony with nature?

There are so many things that you can do to change your lifestyle, a little bit… or a lot…

Anything you do helps us all. As modern physics shows us, we are all far more deeply interconnected than we have realized.

You may be — as I have been — overwhelmed or angry or not sure what matters the most. The purpose of this site is to help you choose what you can do to live more simply, what actions of yours can have the greatest beneficial effect on the planet.

It isn’t always what you think it will be. There are a lot of stereotypes and misconceptions out there. For example, recycling trash is certainly worthwhile but it is not going to save the planet. On the other hand, I think the world needs much more reasonable dialogue about how many children to have, if any.

The simple living movement has been around for decades, also often known as voluntary simplicity. The green component has always been there, but now many people who might not be drawn to simple living itself do care about green living.

Simple living, green living… not identical, but mostly overlapping. I write about both.

My husband Kelly and our close friend Peter Rice, with some help from me, built an earthbag home in Crestone, Colorado. We used thousands of bags meant to hold rice but they had been misprinted and we got them as seconds. Into them we put scoria — small volcanic rocks commonly used on lawns in dry climates. They are great insulation. We plastered the house, inside and out, with papercrete, Read the rest >>>