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.

(