If your lighting is so bad you can’t read a Kindle there, its probably not doing your eyes any great favor to read paper books there either.

Turns out that’s something of a myth. The British Medical Journal did a study in December: turkey doesn’t make you sleepy, no need to drink 8 glasses of water a day (you already get most of the liquid you need by eating food), and reading in dim light doesn’t damage your eyes.

The amount of energy used by a backlit LCD over an E Ink screen is substantial when you are talking about battery life of a sub 1000mAh battery or the output of a small solar panel, but utterly trivial when thinking about energy use on a global scale. A quick calculation of this, assuming a backlit LCD uses about 3W more average power than a similar E Ink screen, indicates that the power saved by the E Ink screen over an hour of reading is equivalent to that used by driving an average car about 5 meters. So even if you read 3 hours a night every day of the year, the amount of energy you would have saved with E Ink is about like driving your car 3 miles less for the whole year…

Anyway, my point is just that the power savings for E Ink are very real and matter a lot in some ways; but global environmental impact is probably not one of them. Also true is that burning a halogen bulb for a few hours a night is going to use a lot more power than the backlit LCD, but its also not at all significant in terms of global impact.

I understand not wanting to make changes, but you must not be that afraid of change if you got a Kindle in the first place. So why not bust out and get some better lighting in your reading space!

That being said, if your use case is that you don’t read in daylight (outside, in a train, office, your house during daytime, etc.) and only read in darkness or very poor lighting, a backlit LCD may be a better fit.