The web is abuzz with talk of Amazon’s new e-book reader, the Kindle, which will launch tomorrow at a swanky gala at the W Hotel in NYC, timed to coincide with the finest media coverage that money can buy. Some say it’s a dreadful bit of industrial design destined for the dustbins of failed electronic devices, others say it will define the future of reading. Personally, I’m obsessed with its ecological impact.

Here’s what I’m trying to figure out: is the Kindle a vast improvement over the current dead-trees approach to publishing? At first glance, it seems like it definitely is. There are around 3 billion books sold worldwide each year, which adds up to an awful lot of trees being cut down, shipped off for processing, ground into pulp, made into paper, shipped off to printing houses, printed with toxic inks, glued with toxic glues, shipped to distributors, shipped to vendors, and finally shipped to recipients.

With the Kindle, you can summon a book directly through the aether. Just click a button, and the magic of the internet and cellular telephony will deliver it to you in seconds. Carbon footprint: zero. But it’s not really zero, of course. First, all the materials for the device have to be individually fabricated and/or sourced. This includes metals (likely toxic), plastics (ditto), and perhaps glass and ceramic (perhaps less toxic). Then the devices need to be assembled, shipped to distributors, and then shipped to recipients, who will then discover that, unlike dead-tree books, these Kindles take power to operate. Carbon footprint? Unknown. And then there’s the matter of planned obsolescence and the dirty little problem of consumer electronic waste. Starting to long for dead trees?

Of course, this all begs some deeper questions: can we fabricate a book out of entirely recycled and non-toxic materials? Sure. And could we do the same thing with the Kindle? Certainly. And we could even power it with renewable energy — one could do worse than trekking into the wilderness with a solar backpack and a slim little Kindle filled with hundreds of books. Assuming all recycled non-toxic materials for both, I’m thinking that the Kindle might just come out way ahead in the ecological race. And with humankind’s current technophilia, I’m suspecting that even a non-eco Kindle (or its inevitable sexier kin) will eventually displace the analog book.

But deeper still, what happens when climate change reaches a tipping point (looking closer and closer these days), and Amazon becomes just another jungle? E-ink may be as easy on the eyes as paper, but in the end, it may be far more ephemeral.