So Kobo — Rakuten's e-reader, the one people buy to feel morally superior to a Kindle — now auto-syncs every finished book to StoryGraph, the reading-tracker app Nadia Odunayo runs, and stamps it "Read" forever. Rob Frelow, StoryGraph's co-founder, calls this frictionless. I call it a shallow ice core.
A Greenlandic core from Summit Station logs CO₂ from 12,000 BCE in trapped air bubbles. My Kobo logs that I finished a Sally Rooney novel at 11:42 PM. Same archival principle. One of them I consented to.
Each sync request is roughly 4.1 grams of CO₂ once you route it through a Virginia data center on the average grid mix — I did the arithmetic — so a 280-page paperback now costs more to mark finished than to print.
Meanwhile Jeff Bezos owns four houses with heated driveways. The permafrost remembers that too.
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Based on the original article "Watch out, Amazon: The Kobo eReader now has a Goodreads rival".
