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Perhaps there are two different issues here.
1. Making an electronic book reader uses a fair number of resources, but I hope to have mine for a few years yet. In the meantime, since I've had it, I've bought fewer paper books, saving some trees (maybe).
2. Paper books also use a fair amount of resources. The wood-pulp may be renewable but I'm rather worried about the dioxins used to bleach the paper white. In Pontypool, 10 miles from where I live, people were advised not to eat home-grown vegetables from their gardens because of the risk from dioxins from Rechem, a local waste-incineration plant.
And the quality of paper books is very variable. I've got some 18th and early 19th century books which have barely aged. I've also got some useless paperbacks which went yellow in no time, have glued-in pages which fall apart, and mean that the book is seen as a very temporary product. This sort of thing seems wasteful to me.
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