And after the book is shipped and sold, then it costs money to store again. Libraries, university libraries, can get or raise more money to buy books, but they can’t conjure up any more space for them.

The paper’s also more expensive — the presses ship all over the country/world, while a paper mostly ships locally — it’s a whole other thing.

Slate wrote about this summary on relative environmental impacts of reading on paper versus reading online: http://www.slate.com/id/2185143.

A study by the Royal Institute of Technology in 2007 (that I wrote about then but can’t offhand find online) found newspapers were slightly worse for the environment than internet use, mainly because of carriers driving. But magazine, delivered by postal trucks that were running anyhow, were less harmful than the aggregated costs of electricity, energy and materials needed to put information online.

The graphic found here (http://www.forest.fi/smyforest/foresteng.nsf/allbyid/316C3B1D74B200AEC22574BA00342120/$file/G076_eng_08.pdf) suggests that the longer it takes to read something, the less advantage online shows (which makes sense). Thus books could well be the exception to your assumption. (Kindle etc probably changes the equation dramatically since they are read offline).

P.S. I wish I knew how to embed links in this. Sorry.