This is not the conclusion reached by British scientists, but by UK accessibility experts. The research evidence suggests that the more a document weighs, the larger its carbon footprint. And PDF files do weigh several tens of percent more (in the example given in the article, 42% more) than HTML documents, which means they do more damage to nature. Heavier PDF files take longer to download to your device (draining the battery), take up more space (provoking you to buy a new device or additional memory) and are not documents adapted to different screen sizes (you will spend more time reading a document on a small smartphone screen or take out your tablet to read it).
HTML documents are not only websites, but also documents and books in EPUB format. Without claiming to be a serious researcher, I nevertheless often find that books in EPUB format weigh less than PDF or FB2 when using pictures of the same quality. In addition, EPUB is a container that contains everything you need to edit the text or optimize the illustrations. But PDF always has the source file from which the file was derived somewhere, and it does not just lie there, it takes up space and consumes energy.
But lest you think that I'm so good with my favorite EPUB that I'm even protecting nature from harmful emissions by simply choosing the right book format, I'll give you the following information. A calculator that calculates the carbon footprint of websites has placed the home page of my humble electrobooks.media resource in the critically bad F zone and declared that it is “dirtier” than 88% of web pages worldwide.
But on the other hand, an individual article from the site marked it as A+ and praised it in every way possible. Obviously, I should optimize the images on the homepage so as not to shock the carbon footprint calculators.
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