E-books are simple, in principle. They replace the familiar, texturally
pleasing dead-tree kind of book with a device that most closely resembles a
laptop with no keyboard. For years, the glossy, low-resolution display on most
e-books has been one of the most significant barriers to their adoption, but a
new display technology called e-ink has that problem pretty much licked.

The e-ink display of Amazon's latest entrant in the field, the Kindle 2, has
a lot in common with paper: It's high-contrast, high-resolution and can be
viewed with reflected light—just like a real book. And while e-books sales are
only three percent of the global book market, e-book
reading software is proliferating across other devices, from the iPhone to "ultraportable" computers.

The accelerating popularity of e-books has traditional publishers scrambling
to make sure the devices don't do to their business what the web did to
newspapers: In fact, this month, Indigo Books & Music cited the explosion of
e-book readers as the primary motivation for their move into e-book
publishing, and Amazon's Kindle library now includes 240,000 books, not to
mention newspapers and magazines.

Whether or not the iPod-ization of book reading is now inevitable, change
always begs the same question around these parts: Are e-books green?

The greenest way to read

The short answer is almost certainly yes but only if you're comparing e-books to new
books.

As usual, the greenest way to go is reuse—buying used books online won’t do
your favourite author any favours, but Mother Earth will smile on you for the
estimated 3 kg of carbon emissions you've averted by not buying a new book. (Seventy percent of those emissions are released in
the course of simply producing the paper it’s printed on.)

Several studies have attempted to break down the carbon footprint of reading
on screen versus paper, but they've mostly focused on newspapers.
(