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This comparison is a small life-cycle assessment with two very different cost structures. A printed book carries a burden that repeats with every copy, dominated by pulp and paper making rather than printing: published estimates run from roughly 1 kg CO2e for a lightweight mass-market paperback to about 7.5 kg for a hardcover, and the Book Industry Study Group's 2008 assessment put the US industry average near 4 kg, often quoted as 8.85 pounds per book. An e-reader inverts that structure. Almost all of its impact is embodied in manufacture, concentrated in semiconductor fabrication and the electrophoretic display, with charging adding only about 1 kWh per year. Because a fixed manufacturing burden is amortised across every title read, the two curves cross at a break-even count near 20 to 30 books per device lifetime. The result is therefore extremely sensitive to three inputs: how long the device survives before replacement, how many books are read on it, and whether the physical alternative is new or secondhand. A device replaced every two years may never break even for a reader finishing six books a year. Conversely, library borrowing and used copies divide the printed footprint across many readers and usually beat both options outright. Other caveats rarely appear in the arithmetic: recycled and FSC-certified stock cuts paper impact substantially, remaindered and pulped unsold copies inflate the real per-copy figure since a sizeable share of print runs is never sold, and e-books are licensed rather than owned, so access can be revoked in ways a shelf cannot.

The method used here descends from a 1969 study by the Midwest Research Institute for the Coca-Cola Company, which compared beverage containers from raw material through disposal. That work, known as Resource and Environmental Profile Analysis, is generally treated as the first life-cycle assessment. The Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry codified the approach through workshops beginning in 1990, and the International Organization for Standardization formalised it in ISO 14040 in 1997 and ISO 14044 in 2006, which established the inventory-and-impact structure still used for product footprint claims. The book-versus-device question only became answerable once electronic reading was commercially real. Electrophoretic display technology emerged from Joseph Jacobson's group at the MIT Media Lab, commercialised through E Ink Corporation founded in 1997. Sony's Librie of 2004 was the first commercial E Ink reader, and Amazon's Kindle followed in November 2007. In 2009 the Cleantech Group published a widely cited analysis by Emma Ritch concluding that a Kindle offsets its manufacturing footprint after roughly 22 to 23 books, the origin of most break-even figures still quoted. The New York Times ran a comparable graphic, How Green Is My iPad, by Daniel Goleman and Gregory Norris in April 2010. On the print side the Green Press Initiative, founded in 2001, worked with publishers on recycled and certified fibre commitments and co-produced the 2008 industry carbon study.