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 At the Green Travel Hub, we love finding gadgets that help save our planet, and the Amazon Kindle does just that.  If you wanted one for Christmas but you didn't get it, this would be the perfect gadget to buy if you have some gift cards or gift cash to burn.  It dawned on me recently how green and eco-friendly the Kindle and other electronic book reading devices really are.  If portable, electronic reading continues to become more popular, it will literally save millions of trees from being cut down to produce paper books.  Not only will it help reduce the amount of books we consume for personal use, but it will also reduce the production of textbooks, which are sometimes thousands of pages.  The Green Travel Hub hereby proclaims The Amazon Kindle as the best eco-friendly gadget for the green traveler.  The Kindle reduces paper waste AND reduces the weight of your travel bags, which helps fuel economy on jets.  If 200 people each brought two books to read on a jet and the average book weighed 3 pounds, that’s 1,200 pounds less that the jet needs to carry! 

Here are some great features of the Kindle:

• Slim: Just over 1/3 of an inch, as thin as most magazines
• Lightweight: At 10.2 ounces, lighter than a typical paperback
• 3G Wireless: 3G wireless lets you download books right from your Kindle; no annual contracts, no monthly fees, and no hunting for Wi-Fi hotspotsGlobal
• Coverage: Enjoy 3G wireless coverage at home or abroad in over 100 countries. See details. Check wireless coverage map.
• Paper-Like Display: Reads like real paper without glare, even in bright sunlight
• Carry Your Library: Holds up to 1,500 books
• Longer Battery Life: Now read for up to 1 week on a single charge with wireless on, a significant improvement from the previous battery life of 4 days
• Built-In PDF Reader: Your Kindle can now display PDF documents natively. Native PDF support allows you to carry and read all of your personal and professional documents on the go.
• Read-to-Me: With the experimental Text-to-Speech feature, Kindle can read newspapers, magazines, blogs, and books out loud to you, unless the book's rights holder made the feature unavailable
• Large Selection: Over 390,000 books, including 101 of 112 New York Times® Best Sellers, plus U.S. and international newspapers, magazines, and blogs. For non-U.S. customers, content availability and pricing will vary. Check your country.
• Low Book Prices:New York Times Best Sellers and New Releases are $9.99, unless marked otherwise. When traveling abroad, you can download books wirelessly from the Kindle Store or your Archived Items. U.S. customers will be charged a fee of $1.99 for international downloads.

Don’t want to spend $250?

If you have an iPhone or Blackberry, you can download the Amazon Kindle app for free and buy books from the Kindle store.  Then, simply read the books from your mobile device.  The only disadvantage to this is that the viewing screen of the iPhone and Blackberry are much smaller than the Kindle’s 6” screen, so it may not be an option for all iPhone and Blackberry owners. 

We are not specifically endorsing the Kindle, it just happens to be the best and most popular electronic reader.  We are bigger fans of the concept of electronic reading, because it reduces the amount of paper that will be used in the future, reduces traveling weight, and it is a much more efficient way to read and store books.  We are big advocates of any new technology that helps preserve our environment!