Amazon Kindle is Green, Is it enough?

One of the biggest selling points, which surprisingly Amazon hasn’t tapped into, is Kindle’s greenness. It’s one of the best gadgets for people who want to help save the environment and save money in the process. It’s true that charging $9.99 for e-books is a bit much, but e-books can still save you a bit of money. But when it comes to greenness, e-books are the winner by a long mile. A recent study by CleanTech Group assesses that Amazon Kindle can help reduce carbon dioxide emission by 10.9 tons by 2012. It’d be interesting to see whether publishers will take the chance and scale back their book production. But overall it’s a positive trend.

The question at this point is whether customers are purchasing Amazon Kindle for its “eco-friendly-ness.” Does it even matter at this point? It’s a tough question to tackle. In one hand, it’d be great if people cared more about the environment around them and bought Amazon Kindle not only for its cost savings but also for its greenness. But e-b00k readers are a good example of eco-friendly gadgets that are useful and don’t make you change your lifestyle dramatically. So regardless of what people’s intentions are when buying a Kindle, it still going to help the environment in the long run.

Amazon still needs to work on bringing down the costs of e-books. As much as we love e-books, paying $9.99 for a copy that you can’t share or sell is a bit too much. And since you don’t really own your e-books as Amazon showed with its recent actions, e-book publishers and content distributors need to work on a way to reduce costs and provide e-content in a more affordable manner without taking away our privacy. The e-book market is growing fast, and some of the issues that consumers are facing today is to be expected. But one would hope that things change for the better as more people switch to e-books from regular books.

Your take: did you buy your Kindle to help the environment? How did its “greenness” factor in your buying decision?