SEATTLE, Washington - "I thought I was helping the environment," bewailed Margaret Yee, a systems analyst with a lending institution, "I had no idea e-books were so damaging to the environment." Her feelings were echoed by many after a new study revealed that global warming sharply increased after the advent of the e-book. "We assumed e-books were simply along for the ride," said researcher Allen Arther, "There was no assumption on our part that they were a causative factor. But the facts simply cannot be explained any other way."

"[There are] money-hungry, techno-challenged dweebs at the helm." -- Ross Childrezza, head of People's Right to Read

The problem, postulate researchers, is the incredible amount of energy required to successfully pay for, download, and open the e-books. "Particularly using the Adobe scheme, we found that to download a 2 megabyte e-book required a user actively participating in various logins, registrations, and downloads for an average of 12 hours, resulting in an average of 173.2 megabytes of data transfer," explained Arther, "Boiling all that down to kilowatt hours of energy shows that e-books consume approximately 18 times the fossil fuel of an equivalent published work."

"Preposterous," responded Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen, "Simply ludicrous. An e-book is a marvel of ecological preservation. Granted, there are some initial setup issues which we would all like to see made simpler. Time and experience will see to that. But once the first e-book is successfully loaded, every one after it is as simple as click and read."

E-book opponents say Chizen is missing the point. "He's right as far as it goes," contended Ross Childrezza, head of People's Right to Read. "PeRTor acknowledges that the various e-book schemes used by publishers are far easier to use once they are set up, but we also submit that advanced trigonometry is rather simple once you understand it. The initial setup problems are why we don't have e-book kiosks at the mall, with people lining up to download books to their handhelds via infrared. And with these money-hungry, techno-challenged dweebs at the helm, we never will."

An informal survey conducted by the researchers found that 98% of those that had downloaded an e-book only did so once. The most common reason for not repeating the purchase was "difficulty with installation."

"Who can blame them?" asked Arther, "When has a paperback ever slammed shut in front of your face and declared that it 'expired'?"
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