Big Stone Head goes green!

Big Stone Head: Easter Island and Pop Culture deals in part with the environmental disaster that befell the Rapa Nui people centuries ago.  The complete deforestation of an entire island, which once contained an estimated 16,000,000 palm trees, was part of a century of disaster that reduced a healthy population of as many as 20,000 people to a starving remnant of 110 survivors.

Given the lessons learned by the collapse of Easter Island, it seemed hypocritical to print this book on trees.  Therefore, a decision was made to release it as a downloadable PDF file, or for collectors, as a bamboo USB drive within a gift card.  The card is printed on 100% recycled paper.  Bamboo, of course, is one of the fastest growing and most readily renewable materials on the planet.

The author is aware that many people like to have a hard copy of a book in their hands, and is also aware that a book as lushly filled with spectacular color images as Big Stone Head is, begs to exist as a "real" book.  The possibility of Big Stone Head coming out as a printed book does exist in the future (pending an appropriate printing and distribution scenario), but for now we are interested in exploring the possibilities of the experimental, futuristic, and environmentally-friendly eBook format.

We think of it as "a coffee table book for your computer screen", but if you must print the book out at home, we urge you to at least set up your print queue to use both sides of each sheet of paper!

Sample pages (blue web address lettering does not appear in the real book!):


©2009 James Teitelbaum all rights reserved.