The "dead tree edition" of some document is a paper version of a document, as opposed to alternatives such as one or more files on harddisk (locally or accessed remotely through internet), CD-ROM, diskette, etc. Also called dead tree format or dead-tree-ware.
The term refers to a common raw material for producing paper. In this context, "dead trees" always refers to paper. Related terms include tree carcass for a book and tree-killer for a computer printer.
These dysphemisms are generally used humorously, though seriously. Although the trees involved are rarely endangered species, they are often threatened old-growth trees, or grown in plantations with very poor biodiversity that replaced previously existing natural forests. Also, it is interesting to compare the environmental impact of manufacturing and transport of books to that of electrical power generation and computer hardware manufacture . See also recycling for discussions of the processes involved.
A related saying among computer aficionados is "You can't grep dead trees". From the Unix command grep meaning to search the contents of text files, this means that an advantage of keeping documents in digital form rather than on paper is that they can be more easily searched for specific contents. An exception are texts stored as digital images (digital facsimile), as they can not be searched either, except by sophisticated means such as optical character recognition.
