While I don't read many magazines or newspapers, I read tons of books. Some of them I wind up keeping and rereading, but many get consigned to the local neighborhood garage sale. And those that don't get "recycled" to someone else get sent to our county recycling facility (along with all of our newspapers and magazines).

While recycling is great, I've often wondered if there wasn't a better way. While I love the feel of a book in my hands, it's always bothered me that we create so much - newspapers and magazines, especially - that is destined to be only read once before being discarded.

But it looks like the folks at Amazon.com may have come up with a solution: the Kindle wireless reading device. While it's pretty pricey, my wife and I believe they have enough potential for "greenness" and tons of features for bookworms that we're going to take the plunge and buy two!

My wife and I haven't gotten our Kindles yet, so I'm not going to qualify this as a "review." But for those who are avid readers and are concerned about ways they can help cut back on resource consumption, the Amazon Kindle certainly has its positive points and I wanted to raise it here as something folks should at least take a look at.

At first glance, the Kindle may appear to be just another "e-book reader." And while it is that, it's a great deal more: it's a portable library with instant access to roughly 90,000 books, newspapers, blogs, and magazines that are available for the Kindle through Amazon.com. You can search the store right from your Kindle and buy/download your selections right away. And you don't need to be connected to the computer: the Kindle has its own built-in wireless capability that's available anywhere that you can get most mobile cellular phone service. There aren't any additional fees to pay for this, and - the best part - is that the price for the books is very competitive: even new bestsellers are $9.99, and many of the books are a lot less.

So you can check on Amazon for the features, but my interest here is in considering how the Kindle and similar technologies can help us reduce the impact of bookworms such as myself on natural resources.

Even if the trees used for books, magazines, and newspapers are from managed renewable forests, all the intermediate resources - from fuel transporting the raw materials through finished books to the chemicals needed to process them - generally aren't.

With the Kindle, while you have a resource impact to actually produce the device, there's a minimal impact after that: the communications grid the Kindle uses to download material is already being maintained anyway as part of our cellular phone network. And past that, there isn't much else involved beyond the world of electrons (and, speaking of electrons, it's not like the Kindle uses a lot of electricity, either).

Now, even if all that is true and the Kindle turns out to be a nice handful of green goodness, you may not feel that a price tag of $399 is worth it. Despite the features of this device, like many things it is certainly not for everyone.

But for a lot of folks it makes good sense. For example, one of the reviewers on Amazon was going to take a tour with Doctors Without Borders, and was going to load all of his medical reference texts onto his Kindle to take with him. There would be virtually no way to take all of those references in hardcopy. On top of that, he could search for what he needed in the texts on the Kindle; you can't do that with paper books.

For bookworms like my wife and I, a big consideration when considering something this expensive is how long it would take to pay for itself. The math for my wife's situation is pretty easy. She loves buying new releases of her favorite authors, and a lot of those books go for as much as $30 when they first hit the street in hardback. Yes, I know, it would be wiser to just wait a while until they go on sale (or get them in paperback), but...well, I guess we all have our own kind of crazy.

Anyway, if she buys 20 Kindle books for $9.99 each that she would've had to pay $30 for at the bookstore, well, the Kindle just paid for itself. On top of that, the Kindles convenience is very appealing: for instance, being at an airport and finishing a book, but not having the sequel handy. With the Kindle, you just buy and download it. Sure, not every book is available through the Kindle, so if you're interested in this gadget check out the titles to see if what you want is there. But with over 90,000 titles and growing, there's almost sure to be a wide selection. And you can tote around a pretty substantial library with you!

So, if you enjoy reading or are a student or professional who would like to have tons of searchable information at your fingertips, check out Amazon's Kindle wireless reading device: it might be just what you're looking for.

P.S. I'll post a review of the Kindle here after we receive ours.

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