I recently read a short article in the Boston Globe that referenced a study by the Virginia Quarterly Review on the true cost of reading an e-book. One of the paragraphs reads:
In fact, the human and environmental impact of mining for electronics is huge. The pace of innovation in electronics is so fast, with many devices getting replaced after only two years of use, that electronic reading is actually far more costly, in energy terms, than paper reading. If you take all of the resources that go into making iPad-like devices and gather them up, "the nearly ten million e-readers expected to be in use by next year would have to supplant the sales of 250 million new books" each year for the transition between paper and paperless to come out even. Reading a book on an iPad uses almost 50 times as much energy as reading one by electric light.
So, from their math (250M / 10M = 25), if each e-reader is used to purchase 25 books, then paper and electronic-paper will come out even? That sounds easy to do, and it doesn't even take into account e-magazines and e-newspapers. Also, I want to see the math behind their claim in the last sentence.
