My 'Green' Library?

A few days ago E and I were talking about our currents reads and the books that we have on our ever-growing list of things to read. As I am prone to, I commented on the sheer joy it is hold a book and feel the pages between my fingers and he smiled and we observed a moment of silence, each imagining that irreplaceable feeling. He shook himself out of his reverie by suddenly remarking that he had tried Amazon's Kindle once. He had a sad faraway look in his eyes. And then as if to be fair to it, he added that they'd worked a lot on the interface by making it's look and feel match as closely as possible the real thing. The book. It can come close, but it cannot ever be the real thing, we agreed. The book is decidedly a superior object, grown epic in our minds, and reading it in that form a tradition almost, that is left to us to keep alive. We shook our heads on that.
I added, a little wistfully, that more than a year ago, I had all but given up subscribing to newspapers and magazines in paper and had switched altogether to online reading and borrowing from the library instead. The attempt to 'go green' though, had scrambled my morning ritual completely. I no longer relished reading every section, business and international, sports and editorials, from start to finish. Now that it 'sat' in my inbox, it pretty much did just that. I would catch the headlines until a flurry of emails caught my attention. Scrolling the New York Times to find the same article listed twice in two categories is rather irritating, not to mention a series of links on related articles that appears alongside the one you just clicked on, wickedly tempting you to be distracted. Is a person to read an article in peace or what? Now I don't know about all the rest of you, but somehow doing the crossword online, doesn't quite cut it. I still need paper and pencil to fill up the boxes just right. It wasn't much of a debate, we were clearly agreed on the virtues of paper and the evil-ness of its online counterpart. Truly!
And so it went, until I remembered my long-cherished dream of a library in my own home. And I shuddered. If you've read my feverish excitement for a weekend of reading, you would know what that library means to me. I have promised myself collector's editions and bound copies of precious novels. Shelves upon shelves of painstakingly sorted books of all categories surrounded by coziness itself. God forbid, I should come upon the day that this dream will be shattered by one Kindle sitting 'green'ly atop my table! Horrors!
And with that thought arrived our destination. A little rattled by this very real possibility, we bade one another goodbye, thinking to ourselves, I am sure, that perhaps, if we did everything in our power to save the trees and the environment; take our cloth bags to farmer's markets, sign in to the green utilities program, take the train come rain or shine, turn off the sprinklers and stay vegetarian...perhaps, we'd be entitled to our little library?