I’ve written before on how the Kindle is so green that the Gore family must have one in every room, but I was reminded of it again this week while writing about the rumor that Amazon might be considering a plan to send out free Kindles to all of its Amazon Prime customers. From Amazon’s perspective, after all, such an initiative would not only be about accelerating the already fast-moving Kindle Revolution. There would also be great benefit to Amazon’s bottom line because increasing the percentage of Kindle owners among its Prime customers would naturally lead to fewer physical shipments of books to expense against the $79 in annual revenue provided by the Amazon Prime fee.

Turns out there’s a word for this. It’s “dematerialization,” according to the lead paragraph in this post about Green:Net 2010 over at GigaOm:

One e-book device can displace the buying of some 22.5 physical books a year, according to the Cleantech Group, which translates into an estimated savings of 370 pounds of CO2. Indeed, the Kindle, Nook and other e-reader devices are examples of “dematerialization,” putting into digital form what would normally be delivered physically. Such carbon savings potential extends beyond books to CDs and other products….

Can teleportation be far behind? Beam me up, Jeffrey!