Much attention has been given to eBooks, but we’ve been hard pressed to come across anything said about their environmental benefits. So here we are.

eBooks are pretty much on par with reusable bottles and bags in terms of their ability to give consumers affordable, green buying alternatives. But it goes beyond that. The paper manufacturing process is an incredible polluter (air, land and water). Further, many of the paper books read today are printed overseas, shipped around the world by boat, and then trucked to distribution centres and again to local bookstores.

On the flipside, we read somewhere that one hour of energy spent on a laptop computer reading an eBook equals the amount of energy expended to create four sheets of paper. And the Fat Knowledge blog came across three studies looking at whether the new eBook reader Amazon Kindle is better for the environment that a paper book. Environmental Science and Technology featured a similar article on this subject that is also worth a gander.

Happy reading. We hope you find it less confusing than we do. As ES&T wrote, Our world has become such a complicated place that every purchasing decision can become a Ph.D. dissertation topic, as I quickly learned.

Photo Credit: Fat Knowledge