1 Would burning a paper book release enough energy to read the same publication on an ebook?

Paper is primarily made of cellulose. Since cellulose is just a polymer made of glucose, I'm going to say that the enthalpy of combustion is going to roughly the same at -2805 KJ/mol. So a 500 gram book is 2.78 moles of glucose, combustion of that would yield ~8 MJ of energy.

A first generation kindle has a battery with a capacity of ~1500 mAh @ a nominal voltage of 3.7 V. Yielding an energy capacity of 5.55 Watt hours. 8 MJ is 2222 Watt hours.

So, in conclusion (and assuming I did the math right), the energy released by the combustion of a 500 gram book could charge your kindle 400 times.

I'm having a hard time finding a number for the energy of paper, but let's assume that paper is basically carbohydrates, with 4 kCal/gram. A paperback book might be 200 grams = 800 kCal = 3.3 MJ (megajoules)

A kindle battery is 1530 mAh at 3.6 volts, which is about 20 kJ.

So with these assumptions, burning the paperback releases enough energy to recharge a kindle 165 times.

Do you have a specific book and ereader you are thinkng about to use to calculate this?

speculation in the mean time:

Theoretically or realistically?

Theoretically if you had a system that was extremely efficient for capturing the heat and transferring it into electricity, and then you had an e-ink ereader so big it could display the entire book one a single page. you would probably generate enough power to power the e-ink and display the book.

burning a book, capturing the power, storing it, and using it to read an ebook at your leisure, scrolling through each page individually, i highly doubt. Pretty much all of the power of an eink reader is to navigate between pages, virtually no power is required to keep the eink on the page (technical term is bistable)