It never fails: If you’re a publisher appearing in public nowadays — on a panel discussion, doing an interview, walking the dog — someone is going to stand up and accuse you of murdering trees, of ruining the atmosphere by having trucks move books about, and of, in general, being a dinosaur who is harming the planet irredeemably by publishing books. (Invariably, the person who attacks you thusly at a public appearance will also, afterwards, pitch you their novel. Which they envision in hardcover.)

In any event, the question is, are ebooks, by being composed of bits of ether, actually better for the environment than, er, 100% recyclable books?

According to Tom Tivnan in a recent report for The Bookseller, maybe not.

For example: One study, Tivnan notes, “by the San Francisco-based Cleantech Group, a company which supports the development of clean and environmentally sustainable technologies, suggested that, on average, the carbon an Amazon Kindle emits in the life of the device is offset in its first year. Emma Ritch, author of The Environmental Impact of Amazon’s Kindle, wrote that after that first year, each additional year’s use would ‘result in net carbon savings, equivalent to an average of 168kg of CO2 per year’ — the amount of emissions produced in the manufacture and distribution of 22.5 printed books.”

But the Cleantech report, and other similar reports, “skims over” some key issues, says Tivnan. It doesn’t discuss, for example, “the long-term landfill implications of devices that are certainly not biodegradable and may contain toxic materials.” (To understand how serious an omission this is, see this devastating 60 Minutes report on how people in China and other third world nations are dying in the effort to get rid of our old electronic devices.)

“And that leaves aside the social and environmental implications of ‘resource extraction’, or the obtaining of raw materials — which more often than not come from developing countries.” Here Tivnan is referring to materials such as tantalum or coltan, a.k.a.“blood coltan” — minerals included in every cell phone and ereader. (See this devastating report on how these minerals are mined under deadly conditions in warring regions of Africa by virtual slaves.)

Tivnan doesn’t get into the fact that ereader devices, like books, get to the store via trucks. But he does note that “e-book devices, hooked up either wirelessly or through a PC to the internet, do use a not inconsiderable amount of energy.” And studies such as the Cleantech report don’t say much about “where the electricity comes from.” Nor does the report say anything about the server farms where the bits of ether that are ebooks are stored — server farms which are on track to do more damage to the atmosphere than airplanes, which is considerable, according to this recent report from The Economist.

In short, and disregarding any consideration of sociological considerations, direct comparisons of the environmental impact of print and electronic formats of books are complicated and multi-faceted, and so the jury is still out. But as studies continue to attempt to make that comparison, it’s hard not see old-fashioned, 100% recyclable printed books as the superior technology when it comes to taking care of mother earth.