The Carbon Footprint of Reading

Are e-books greener than regular books? Bookseller.com has a discussion about it.

From the piece...

Eco-conscious consumers face these sorts of dilemmas every day, the sort of electric handdryer versus paper towel debates (on that one, Al Gore recommends neither but waving your hands around in the air). But with the Amazon Kindle now available in the UK and the e-book market certain to rise, a vexing question UK consumers will certainly be asking themselves is this: are e-books greener than print?

As often with these green debates, the answer is less than certain. A few recent reports from the US fall heavily on the "e is greener" side. In August, a study by the San Francisco-based Cleantech Group, a company which supports the development of clean and environmentally sustainable technologies, suggested that, on average, the carbon an Amazon Kindle emits in the life of the device is offset in its first year.

Emma Ritch, author of The Environmental Impact of Amazon’s Kindle, wrote that after that first year, each additional year’s use would "result in net carbon savings, equivalent to an average of 168kg of CO2 per year"—the amount of emissions produced in the manufacture and distribution of 22.5 printed books.