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Originally Posted by BKeeper
IWe're not going back to prehistory, it's not going to stop.
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As said, extreme overexaggerations don't explain anything. But yes even if would word it very differently, the core assumption is I guess the same, even if eBooks are not more environment friendly than paper books, a lot of other stuff speaks for eBooks, therefore we consider it "better". If it wouldn't, then it would really be just a step backward...
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What about the energy (literally) and time I would spend wandering store after store looking for a book?
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As long as you *wander* around, this uses perfect renewable energies, and the human body is one of the most efficient "fuel" combustion "machines", not much human build machines can get even close there (altough I expect to be a lot of animals that are yet more efficient).
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People talk about books like they are fungible and universally available at any store. I don't want any book, I want THAT book. Most of the time I cannot obtain the books I read locally, most of the time I pay more for S&H than for the books themselves. I hate it.
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This is a question if this gets with e... or if it gets even worse with DRMs and that. This is and stays a very interesting social question.
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Ebook readers grant potentially universal access to all books (in print or otherwise).
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Technically yes, socially not unless there is a battle to be won. Look a lot of articles should be available on PDF; I wouldn't mind to get them as PDF, but I cannot. When it comes to rare stuff its still much more easy to get a paper copy than an electronic.
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Now if any study can conclude that it's cheaper (and greener) to have every book locally available then I will go back to college and retake microeconomics 101. 
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Look this always a ground problem of any social science. Everyone here thinks its "common sense" that eBooks are more environment friendly than paper, because paper is such an "evil tree cutting tech"... Now if you do a study that conforms to your common sense, you will say: What? That needed you X dollar and Y months to find out? I could have told you in a minute. If you get a result that contradicts common sense, people say: "such a bullshit, I mean thats totally wrong, everybody can tell you that"... Its interesting enough if a natural scientists comes up with something that is totally against your common sense (like modern physics do) people go oh and ah, if you a social scientist, people tell you are "obviously" wrong.