I have seen e-books described as green and questioned this from just the end product view. Paper books are at least bio degradable. If people throw away their electronic reader every three years I don't think they're as environmentally friendly to dispose of. I'm not an expert though.
I give kudos to Sony who have announced a program in Canada where you can return any of their products for them to be recycled. I'm not sure if this is a worldwide program.
http://www.sonystyle.ca/html/eco_min...b_recycle.html
Like most things you can play with the numbers to get the answer you want and big businesses like the paper industry will sponsor studies to show that e-books aren't environmentally friendly. If I look from a high level though I don't see how you can say it's not green. There are staggering power costs for producing and shipping paper products. Even ignoring the production costs just consider the costs to heat, cool and power all the book store and distribution centers used for paper books not to mention the fuel costs for people to get to and from the stores.
The internet costs are one area where you can really play with the numbers. If you add up all the costs of the servers and infrastructure to service the internet and say that e-books use 0.01% of this the numbers would look very bad. The internet costs aren't going away if you get rid of e-books though and if you consider the bandwidth size of them compared to what a single teenage boy downloads in a month... well it's a rounding error.
What would you like the answer to be? Pay me the right $ and I'll create the cost case for you.
E-books are green!