So far, this discussion seems to center around the consumer's perspective, or whether buying all paper books or all electronic books would have a higher environmental cost.
It might be more significant to look at this from the publishing perspective. Here in the U.S., publishers have been willing to accept returns from stores at full value for decades. This was a policy started during the depression to keep stores purchasing books when the economy was bad, and has not been changed. The net effect of this is that books are shipped, returned, warehoused, shipped again (sometimes even to the original store!), returned, etc. Add to this the fact that most published books are not successful sellers here, and you end up with a very large carbon footprint, and net pollution is high (trucks, climate controlled warehouses, climate controlled retail stores, production, recycling waste, etc). I'm aware that the rest of the world does not work this way, but publishers are having a hard time shifting away from this in the US. There is a nice article explaining this situation you can listen to on NPR's website:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...oryId=91461568 I'd suggest this as a fascinating program that is well worth listening to for the 7 minutes it runs.
Compared to that, a future where books, newspapers and magazines are shipped electronically certainly seems on the surface to be more desirable. There are issues that need to be addressed to "green" up the e-book industry, but the publishing industry in the U.S. is remarkably wasteful.