October is Energy Awareness Month, which makes this announcement perfectly timed.

If you know anything about Drollerie Press, you know that we give to a number of causes. We feel very strongly about reading and education, disease, poverty, hunger, diversity, equal rights, and many more. One thing we haven’t yet addressed is taking care of our planet. According to ecogeek.org, the “average person produces 9 tons of CO2 per year.” So what we have been researching most recently is a way to offset our carbon footprint.

I think we have a good start focusing on ebooks. Though I cannot find a study that discusses emissions savings on print books over electronic books, I hope that I’m not making too large an assumption to assume that a new study conducted by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Stanford University about digital music could be applied to books. The resesearchers found that  buying digital music results in a 40 to 80 percent reduction in energy use and carbon emissions compared to distributing CDs, including the energy used to download them (from earth2tech.com).

We’re dedicated to ebooks, but we like print books too, and despite the energy savings of digital downloads over physical copies, there are still energy costs involved.

We are pleased therefore, to announce that, as of October 1, 2009, Drollerie Press is planting a tree with every book released, whether in electronic or print format.

Eventually we hope to be able to offset the carbon footprint of every book we sell, but for now we’re happy to be able to take this forward step.