I was attempting to make the point that environmentally the issue is more complex than Salam was suggesting, and you are basically saying that it’s even more complex than even I was suggesting.

Either way you slice it, even if his over-all conclusions turn out to be valid, Salam is clearly oversimplifying the environmental impacts of books vs Kindles.

On an episode of Penn and Teller’s BS, they claimed that the trees cut down to make paper for books are explicitly grown for that purpose, and wouldn’t even exist if there was no need for them. In essence, they are suggesting that even if we all switched to Kindles, there would be no more trees than there are today, in fact there may be fewer, because we wouldn’t need them.

I don’t know about that. I’ll have to look it up. It mainly just gets at the deforestation issue though. Environmentalists are also concerned with the wastewater and energy involved in turning trees into paper products, and the accompanying pollution.

As for the energy costs in the manufacture and transportation of books, there is also an energy cost in powering the Kindles, and powering the servers that host the books for downloads.

Again, it’s not just a matter of energy cost, though I suspect it probably costs less energy to power Kindles and host books on servers for downloading. There are also the effects on human and natural environments to consider: traffic congestion, wear on roads, other physical infrastructure that would no longer be needed or needed as much; pollution and carbon emissions from transporting paper to book printers, books to bookstores, returning unsold books to their publishers, customers driving to and from bookstores to buy books, energy costs for all this; paper waste in landfills; space taken up in homes and offices by books; the transportation of wood for bookcases. And so on.

I’m not saying that Kindle has no environmental advantage over books, I’m just saying that it’s not as straightforward or obvious as Salam suggests.

I don’t know. I don’t have any hard data on hand to back it up, but it seems pretty intuitive to me. And as I pointed out, environmentalists are concerned with more than just deforestation and energy costs. There’s the quality of the human environment to consider too (e.g., traffic congestion).

As for the energy costs in the manufacture and transportation of books, there is also an energy cost in powering the Kindles, and powering the servers that host the books for downloads.

I’m not saying that Kindle has no environmental advantage over books, I’m just saying that it’s not as straightforward or obvious as Salam suggests.