Amazon Kindle DX is earning green kudos despite looming lawsuit

Amazon is a big fan of finding new ways for its customers to interact with the content it sells, and those efforts span from purely digital like with videos and cloud computing to hardware with its eBook reader the Kindle DX. Where is the green in that? The Kindle DX is providing a way to interact with printed content minus the paper and that has a notable effect on students who no longer need to buy physical textbooks.

Overall the Kindle DX could mean less paper cycling through our economy and in this instance, educational institutions like universities. Princeton University is one of several colleges experimenting with making textbooks for some course available online.

A representative from the university said “sustainability is the driving force behind Princeton using the Kindle,” according to The New York Times. That’s well and good, but the Kindle DX is composed of plastics and metals itself, which would require many pages of saved paper to make up for its own carbon footprint.

Granted, students are likely to bridge that carbon gap, but other users may not be such prodigious readers. Amazon could certainly use the good publicity though, especially given its recent blunder with deleting George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” remotely from everyone’s Kindle.

But Amazon may be lucky because if nothing else, the green movement is very good at attracting positive publicity and goodwill from wide swaths of consumers, particularly in Generation Y. The environmental impact of the Kindle DX will largely depend on how many people adopt it, and as of August last year, 240,000 people had purchased it.

Certainly many more people have purchased it but the company has a long way to go before its affecting the environment in a significant way. Universities on the other hand are very happy because this contributes to their goal of achieving carbon neutrality.

A worthy pursuit, though carbon may not be be only culprit causing global warming.