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The Myth of the Paperless Office
AdamBa writes: "The New Yorker is running an
interesting review
of the book
'The Myth of the Paperless Office', also discussing
'Scrolling Forward'. Read
it and the ever-informative
Malcolm Gladwell will
explain why paper enables collaborative work much better than computers do, why a messy desk is a sign of productivity, and give a little background on the inventor of the Dewey Decimal System to boot."
Draft copies are the biggest reason there will never be a paperless office. If you have a 15 page draft and distribute it to 20 people for comments, trying to organize and incorporate the comments is damn near impossible. Never mind the act of these people commenting is already 3 times harder than it would be if you just gave out hard copy. My boss decided to try "paperless drafts" for documents we were reviewing and it was an abysmal failure. If the IT department thinks it's clunky and convoluted, then everyone else won't think about it at all.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Things I enjoy about paper:
+ It doesn't crash
+ It rarely loses data
+ 100% availability with proper care
+ Annotations are simple
+ Easy to take with you
+ Content doesn't change
+ Extremely quick access and intuitive interface
+ High resolution/easy on the eyes
Things I don't enjoy about paper:
+ Indexing/searching is tedious
+ Backups can be difficult
Right now, the list of pros/cons favors paper for me. PDAs are starting to reduce some of the cons (i.e. easy to take with you) but still suffer from most of the rest. About the only time a paper document becomes "unavailable" is when it gets lost. Can the same be said for your PC or PDA?
The crisp black-on-white is easy to read. Some LCD panels have text that is pretty easy to read at low resolutions (i.e. 1024x768 at around 100 pixels per inch) but can't touch the level of detail of even a cheap laser printed page of 300 dots (pixels) per inch. Professional typesetting often gets up to 2400 dots per inch. Not even close. This often doesn't matter for text, but what about that detailed network diagram that gets turned to mud at 100dpi. (Don't even get me started on people who use lossy compression on such images...)
Annotations are a given with paper-- just grab a pen and go to town. In the digital world, each and every software package needs to explicitly support annotations in order for this required ability to be present. So far as I know, no major PDF viewer allows one to take notes on it, so off to the printer it goes! (I realize that some PDF authoring software allows this kind of thing. The ones I have seen were masterpieces of overengineering and were correspondingly priced. What's wrong with a basic "notes in the margin" feature included at no cost?)
Until the massive inconveniences of using digital media are resolved, paper will continue to play a dominant role in exchanging and storing information.
1) I can read it while standing in a train.
2) I scribble over it and keep these notes for later reference.
and most importantly,
3) I can take it with me to the loo where I can read it at leisure.
Where have you heard that rainforests are cleared for paper production? Paper is usually made from pulp harvested from tree farms, which IIRC use Southern Pine and other dime-a-dozen species. Rainforests are usually cleared for cattle ranching, construction, and exotic hardwoods.
I've already seen several posters who rate electronic documents over paper documents because of the tree-saving factor; have they all forgotten that the pc uses electricity, which consumes all sorts of natural resources? I'm as much for saving the environment as the next guy is. Let's start by being factual: does anybody have a reliable comparison of Total Energy Cost of paper & electronic documents?
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
I use a lot of email and i read a lot of online texts... i'm a tech geek at heart. I love new technologies, gadgets, and gizmos as much as anyone.
But there's a very good reason I'll never give up paper totally: Comfort.
It's like the person who eats out at gourmet restaurants all the time, but can't resist a grilled cheese sandwich with canned tomato soup. It's comfort food for the mind.
I love the smell of paper, the texture of it, and the way the printed word looks on it. Paper is a very tactile thing. It's there, you feel it. it's a part of your physical world. Words on a view screen will never compete with it, at least not for me.
As an added bonus, I can read a book for 8 hours straight and not want to dig my eyes out with a spoon.
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo - H. G. Wells