Coming Together: Al Fresco

It is customary, when finalizing a Coming Together manuscript, for me to tweak margins and adjust line spacing in order to decrease the page count, thereby decreasing the production cost and increasing the profit margin by a few cents. Thus, more money goes to the target charity. With a volume being published exclusively in digital format, such measures weren’t necessary. No dead trees. No ink. No postage. Just bytes of eroticism arranged on a screen for the readers’ enjoyment.

I’m not one of those people who craves the feel of a book in her hands. I’ve spent the last ten years trying to reduce the amount of paper in my life, from bank statements to medical records to genealogy. If it can be managed electronically, I am so there. Not only is it space efficient, but it’s just damned tidy. I love tidy. Call it a fetish. The environmental considerations are icing on my tidy cake. If I had my druthers, the entire publishing industry would convert to ebook formats tomorrow. Unfortunately, my druthers aren’t driving the publishing industry. Yet.

It’s only a matter of time, though. Electronic books are the future, as inexorable as the tides. They will be doubly driven by nicety and necessity. The gadget hungry of all ages embrace ebooks for their convenience while the environmentally conscious tout their eco-impact or, rather, lack thereof.

Yeah, I know that trees are renewable resources. So are fossil fuels, technically. But it takes time to renew a resource—time and effort—and we’re consuming trees faster than they grow, even with recycling efforts. It doesn’t help that the demand exists for building materials in addition to paper products.

And when we talk about deforestation, we’re not just talking about the availability of wood and paper products. Vegetation has global implications on both the quantity and the quality of life. It produces oxygen, prevents erosion and flooding, filters pollutants from the air we breathe and the water we drink, drives rainfall, and provides habitat for up to 90% of all organisms.

So, this volume of Coming Together—while providing the intrepid reader with a damned fine collection of steamy stories—is also doing its part to preserve our rich ecological heritage. All proceeds benefit Conservation International which believes, as do I, that human societies can live harmoniously with nature while preserving our global biodiversity.

~ Alessia Brio
editor