After tree, producing paper need energy too, and then printing and color need energy too and you print as many books as many customer you have, no! you always print more then you need, so energy consumption is directly propotional to the popularity of the book.

Then think about transporting those books from printing press to book store and then to customer around the corner, how much energy you are wasting there again ….

Sure, you charge the Kindle, but remember we can produce electricity by nuclear plants too, it is not necessary that we will burn coal only…

I am awed by the fact that you can use your phone for so many applications, even Kindle at that! I’m simply stating that there is always consumption: one need only evaluate to what degree he/she uses, and work toward a more sustainable path. Sounds like you’re further along than others, including me, in the paper realm.

I am excited about the possibilities the Kindle could bring to us in the form of an educational tool. How cool would it be for our kids to switch back and forth to different textbooks, look up words in the dictionary, wikipedia, read current events in the paper/blogs/magazines, etc?! So many texts become outdated and thrown out so quickly, and with the Kindle, new textbooks could easily be uploaded.

The most blatant problem? Money. It may be a long time for school districts to jump on the Kindle bandwagon unless we can procure another educational stimulus package. And personally, I’ll be needing some kind of stimulus package too if I ever were to buy one. I mean, after all, the public library is free. And it’s a system that’s already in place. Maybe the library should buy some Kindles…

Also, I get your point, but public libraries have an impact on the environment, too. Those books still need to be produced and transported (your library doesn’t have EVERY book you want, they’ve got to come from somewhere), the heat and lights need to stay on in the building, employees must be paid to keep the resources organized, etc. And by extension, you’re paying taxes to keep the library open. But you’ve got to have a job in order to have taxes to pay. That means all the taxpayer’s job related impact needs to be factored in and amortized across the resources that the library holds. Until you know the true cost of acquiring a book for a given library and then the true cost of retaining that book at the same library, it’s hard to

Sharing is good, no doubt. The Kindle’s DRM has already been broken, so if your conscience (and that of your friends) can handle it, you can already share books at will.

Beyond all that, the Kindle isn’t just hardware anymore. I’ve got the Kindle reader on my phone. Using Amazon (or Gutenberg or other free ebook resources), I can acquire and read books on a device I already own and use for other purposes. What’s the cost of those books? I’m using a device that’s my phone, my email, calendar, contacts management, RSS reader, music player, and ebook reader. It’s definitely not a single-use device, and it definitely wasn’t constructed to be an ebook reader, but it works serviceably. If I pay $8 for a book that costs effectively nothing to store and reproduce, read it on a device that (unlike paper) isn’t single-use, it seems like my book consumption footprint is even smaller than if I bought the same book, used, at my local bookstore.