Surely some of it is US outsourcing relatively material-heavy manufacturing and concentrating on relatively material-light manufacturing (US manufacturing is up

Surely some of it is US outsourcing relatively material-heavy manufacturing and concentrating on relatively material-light manufacturing (US manufacturing is up, it's not total outsourcing of manufacturing), but that doesn't explain the case of global dematerialization of paper for example. For the case of, say, substitution of paper book with ebook, dematerialization does seem to be happening.