There is no doubt that paper as the “final unique destination” has limitations. The chief one being the facility to copy and print out.

It’s a myth that digital docs lead to a paperless world. They lead to the world of massive printing because it is so easy to knock out one more copy at the touch of a button. The digital age consumes more paper, not less.

I sit next to a printer at the office and at least 20% of printouts are never picked up and another 40% are draft copies that will be modified and reprinted before finalisation. If there was any effort whatsoever in producing such a printout, no doubt our demand for paper would plummet.

We need a new term for the world of digital docs. Instead of “paperless,” perhaps we should call it “paper ready.”

The term “paperless” should really be more like “less paper”. You’re never going to get rid of paper. There will always be a purpose for using paper in some form.

The problem is that there just a lot of people out there that default to the use of a printed copy of a digital file for fairly insignificant things. I mean, really…do you need to print out a copy of an e-mail you just got so you can show it to your co-workers during a meeting? Or can you simply forward it to them and make a reference to it?

The goal should be to use “less paper”, not create “more paper” due to bad habits in a digital world.

I’ve recently developed a new paranoia about the “paperless” world. As a known and self-professed geek, I’m exactly the kind of person with the (perceived) ability to manipulate digital documents. As long as that seems more likely than paper forgery, I’m keeping important things (tax returns, bank statements, etc) on paper, lest I be fingered as a forger in some adversarial proceeding.

It bugs me when people equate "scanning" with "paperless." Though you can get rid of the physical paper, and the associated storage challenges, it does very little to improve on some of the organizational challenges paper presents.

Ignoring OCR (which is still a shaky thing), a scanned image of a document is just that: an image. A computer cannot distinguish between it and a LOLCat. I can put the images in folders and attach them to e-mails, but if I want to search for every document associated with, say "bicycles," I would have to go into relevant folders manually.

For something like "bicycles," I would likely have two or three places to look, but if the search term is broader, it might be more difficult. Doing any sort of cross-references search is even more challenging.

If, instead of a picture, it were a machine-readable document (a text file, for instance), I could do these searches. The text could also be easily incorporated into other documents. Storage space would often be less as well.

Scanners may be great for sucking in handwritten notes (though the previously mentioned advantages may make it worth the effort to transcribe them). Some would argue that it is the only way to get a signed document into a computer-based system. I would ask, why haven't we found a better way than pen to paper to authenticate a document. Nicholas Negroponte suggested, fourteen years ago, that the fax machine retarded these efforts. The scanner is merely a continuation of this trend.

Overall, though, I believe that a paperless office is about as useful as a paperless bathroom. You will never be able to totally eliminate it.

You guys are hitting on something I missed in my haste to self-referentially dress up the link for a post: the “paperless” usually ends when it becomes an “office.”

Like missbossy said, which was also mentioned in the article, people tend to print like it’s going out of style at office because it’s fast and free … to them. You spilled coffee on a page? Pity, let me print you the whole thing again. When I worked in a big office, I thought nothing of printing out some 40-some-odd-page document, but I’d never do that at home because it’s my nickel.

And no matter how stringent you might be about staying digital, as jeff said, someone will inevitably print one out anyway. It’s as much about having the right workflow in place, where people feel like they can actually do their jobs without paper copies, as it is simply guilting people into not wasting paper.

The “paperless” idea is probably more applicable to a home user who wants to archive all those old bills and receipts because those documents are simply for their own reference, and short of an audit, they’ll likely never print them again.

I noticed that there were no books in the paperless house of the future. For me, books make the home. A house without books is like a body without a soul.

For complex, rich thinking and creativity, paper remains the “ultimate destination” of choice. Digital media have yet to surpass books both for permanence and quality of thinking. It is impossible to achieve sustained attention and engagement while reading on a screen—at least not the type of sustained attention that is demanded by a good book. A novel or work of serious non-fiction takes time to read and digest. Searching for snippets and quotes on a computer will yield little of value if you haven’t already read the book.

I’m afraid the digital revolution will produce a technocratic elite that is functionally illiterate—an elite that knows how to skim the surface of everything but understands nothing in depth.

At my last job, management would always go on about using less paper in an effort to make the company more “green”. It’s a good premise and one I support. However, just saying it and encouraging it isn’t always enough. If it’s something you don’t (or can’t) dictate as a policy then you can’t enforce. Instead, you can encourage people to not waste paper by “coaching” them. The idea is to give them a friendly reminder of the benefits of not wasting paper and show them how they can potentially be more productive even without that extra print.

I wonder if they’ll start outsourcing toilet paper into the digital age as well. Would make for a cleaner, greener environment.

I like using paper to make lists and notes for my articles and my husband is an illustrator, so it’s hard to do that without actual paper. But I’m all for the convenience of being able to email myself a copy of my passport and travel documents, always paranoid I’ll end up in the likes of ‘Broke Down Palace’. I get dibs on being Kate Beckinsdale though, even though she got a roach in the ear, she also got sprung.

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