Carbon footprint of books

An interesting thread is emerging on a blog titled if:book concerning the sustainability of book publishing. eBooks vs paper books. Having worked in libraries for the last 25 years, and having checked contents of bookstores up and down the west coast of the USA, this is not a trivial question. The things I want to read are in both digital and paper form.

We can probably come up with an electronic carbon emissions figure for electronic books and eMagazines. It would be part of the aggregate global computing and internet carbon cost.

Paper books can be classed as carbon sinks as opposed to carbon sources. But it is not as simple as we might hope. Paper is a refined final product of a long industrial chain, and books even more so.

Many folk assume books go to a library and "stay" there in perpetuity. Well some do, but most don't. Interestingly enough, no one assumes books go to bookstores and "stay" there in perpetuity, not does anyone assume books go to peoples' homes and stay there forever. In fact, most all paper books and magazines eventually are put in a dumpster for disposal or recycled for secondary paper.

Perhaps we can get a sense of paper publishing's carbon footprint by adding up the many steps that lead to printing a book. (For simplicity I am leaving out editorial work, which should be the same whether paper or eBook.)

Here is a partial list of steps in creating a paper book, or magazine, which might help us begin to count the system costs of paper publishing.
1.) A work crew drives to the woods, cuts trees and hauls them to a paper mill.
2.) Mill workers arrive, paper mill does its industrial process and trucks the paper to a printer.
2.1) Ink manufacturing workers go to work. Pigment arrives from process X, other chemicals from process Y. Ink manufacturer does its industrial process and trucks ink to warehouse, then to the printer.
3.) Publisher gets paper and ink. Press operators drive to work and run a press, machinery hauls partly assembled groups of paper, binding and trimming and first level warehousing 1,000 t0 5 million items, aka (print run).
4.) Trucks haul the books to distributors' warehouses. Libraries, bookstores, order books from the publisher or a wholesale jobber, who messages the warehouse, who in turn pull, box and ship the order.

5.1)If it is an online bookstore, they put one or two books in a cardboard box and mail it to a home or office. (skip to step 6)
5.2) Customers get into their favorite transport and physically go to a library or bookstore, perhaps don't find what they want and proceed to another, or set up a special request, and repeat (5.2) when their title arrives.
5.2) Customers go to a library or retail store and pick up a book or magazine as a side element of some other errand.
5.3) Not finding their desired title, they give up the information quest and the whole trip to bookstore or library is a complete waste of energy. Literally. Or they accept a weak substitute--horrors a new unknown author--.

Primary user is through with the item.
6.) Reuse--books are shared with family or friends, sold to used booksellers, donated to libraries for book sales, or recycled.
6.1) Reuse--library client drives back to the library to return the book, drives home. Libraries check books in and out. But how many times? Most modern published books are rather flimsy. Max number or checkouts-100 times for hardbacks with good bindings and quality paper, to as few as 5 to 10 times for a paperback, perhaps that number for magazines.--at which time the book or magazine falls apart simply due to handling and is recycled or in a few cases, rebound.

7.) Recycling or out to a landfill.

So is a paper publication really a carbon sink, neutral, or a carbon source?