More thoughts on the less-paper office
Well — early-to-mid November has been non-stop discussion in the hotly debated topic of the so-called “paperless office”. Early on, Stephen Partridge — Business Development Manager for Acrobat in the UK fired off the first volley with his blog posting, “Paperless Office”. In this piece, Stephen talked about merits of paper as a “technology” and how it still holds a highly dominant position today — and will continue to do so, and perhaps with no complete elimination. Side note: whilst Stephen says this, I do tend to think it’s a nice seque to introduce Acrobat as it has strong paper-like characteristics…
Rowan Hanna, my compatriot, responded with his own thoughts, primarily centered around the common idea that because electronic paper is able to work more elegantly with electronic information, that when it is affordable, that it will be a serious nail in the firewood-paper coffin.
As for me — well, given I’ve been following this topic for years, I couldn’t help but throw my two-cents worth in as to ways of helping this process along. For the most part, I believe that in order to “free your mind” from the habitual use of paper, you’ve got to take the time … and make the effort — much like the early days of learning a new language. Get rid of your printer, make use of the local internet cafe for when you really do need to print. Don’t buy a new ink cartridge if you have a printer (sorry HP, I’ll still use the scanner part of my multifunction printer, scanner, fax, etc…).
And … budget depending, set yourself up with as many monitors and computers as possible — in as many places as possible. You don’t need to spend up big — you’ll find many old-school computers, monitors, etc… floating around from when people upgraded to their 5,000,000 MHZ, 1024-bit Pentium processors.
But all in all — I agree with Stephen — we’ll end up with a “less-paper” office, rather than a paperless office.
Re: Spartacus of Acrobat On The Paperless Office
I recently posted a comment on the Spartacus of Acrobat blog asking Stephen why he doesn’t subscribe to the the “paperless office” theory. After reading his reply I realized that our opinions are roughly the same — I also don’t think that the current technology (hardware mainly) is good enough to replace paper, but I’m a bit more optimistic about the chances of this happening in the future, and also optimistic about the willingness of people to kick the paper habit.
The reasons Stephen doesn’t subscribe to the “paperless office” theory are:
- Paper is highly transportable, with the caveat that I’m not talking about a 5000 page Airbus maintenance manual. For many purposes it’s a compact way of carrying data.
- Paper doesn’t need power, an operating system, or a device to work
- You were taught how to use paper documents when you were 3, or 4 or 5 .. well you get the point.
- When I send you a paper document, I’m confident that it will arive in the same format I sent it, the pagination won’t have changed, font’s will be correct, images won’t be lost etc..
Points 1 and 2 are obviously the key issues. There’s no doubt that the independence, flexibility, transportability and compactness — not to mention disposability — of paper make it an attractive medium. The convenience of scribbling a short note on a scrap of paper; of printing out a memo and reading it on the train home; of not having to worry about damaging the paper (since it costs mere cents to you); of being able to scribble notes in the margins of a document without having to worry about the accuracy of the conversion of the writing from the physical to the digital world; and so on. In fact, the case for paper is pretty compelling — but so is the case against, and moreover are the advantages of a paperless office on the whole – reduced costs and quicker access to information, comprehensive multi-site data backups, enhanced security and less clutter – enough for us to give up the convenience of paper.
Perhaps I’m living in fantasy land, but I’m confident that in the not-to-distant future electronic paper will reach a point where it’s not only good enough to replace regular old paper in most situations, but it’s also affordable enough for people to buy. In my opinion, this, coupled with the overall advantages of working with information that’s stored in an electronic form, will result in the realization of the paperless office dream.
Windows 7 Will Include New Win32 API’s For XPS
The next version of Windows — which coincidentally actually looks pretty good — will include new Win32 API’s for XPS developers. The new API’s will be:
- XPS API provides creation, manipulation, reading, writing and other services for XPS documents and print streams
- OPC API provides creation, manipulation, reading, writing and other services for Open Packaging Conventions-based file formats, including XPS, OOXML and an increasing number of industrial strength third party file formats
- XPS Print API provides a new entry point for applications to benefit from the enhanced XPS Print Path, irrespective of whether the final output device supports XPS
U.S. E-book Sales Increase 55.2 Percent So Far in 2008
TeleRead.org reports that while traditional paper book sales have dropped in 2008, sales of E-books have actually increased 55.2 percent in the same period. To be fair, paper book sales still dwarf E-book sales, by a massive margin — but I expect that the increase in E-book sales will continue in 2009 as electronic E-book readers improve and become more accepted. And as people start to resent the ever increasing postal rates for paper books purchased online.
A Quick Demo Of Sony Reader and E-Ink Technology
If you’ve been following this blog recently you will have noticed that I’ve developed a bit of an obsession with e-book readers. It persists. In this video we see a demo of the Sony Reader and the E-Ink technology that it uses — which not-so-coincidentally, I’m really impressed with.
Wouldn’t it be nice if your laptop screen was as crisp as that?
A Technical Guide To Creating And Sharing Digital Documents
Do you want to learn how to create high-quality digital documents from paper documents? If you replied with an emphatic yes, then I’ve got the perfect article for you. A guide to sharing documents takes you through the entire process: from getting the best results when scanning, to explaining the OCR’ing process and finally a demonstration on how to the best results when converting the scanned image to PDF.
This guide specializes on how to produce a digital document that is worth sharing. Namely the technical aspect, the trade-off between quality and file size. This guide aims to empower you to get most out of that trade-off. Too many people share low quality documents that are too big, and that is not only a waste of bandwidth, but also of time, because others will have to scan the same document again later, or at least spend considerable time cleaning it up. Scanning documents is a lot of work, and it’s a pity if it has to happen twice.
Full article: Guide to sharing documents.
BeBook Technical Review
Courtesy of Ian P. Christian, a review of BeBook, an E-Ink reader:
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The Paperless Paper Revolution
The biggest problem with the implementation of the Paperless Office is that we tried to run before we could walk. That is to say, we tried to go paperless, before we had a compelling alternative to paper.
I think you’ll all agree that lugging around an awkwardly sized, and piping hot, laptop everywhere you go, just isn’t practical. And if it ain’t practical, it ain’t going nowhere.
In fact, it’s quite unreasonable and unrealistic, to ask someone to desist from using paper entirely — including paper books — given that the experience and convenience of dealing with paper is far superior.
The good news however, is that the winds of change are beginning to blow through our homes and offices, and we’ll soon be able to change that “is” to a “was”. Why am I so confident? Well a number of reasons really.
Electronic Reading Devices
Given the recent onslaught of a new breed of electronic reading devices — the Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, iRex Digital Reader, Readius, Astak Mentor, BeBook Reader and Cybook G — it’s reasonable to assume that these companies think that e-book reading devices have a bright future. Indeed it looks like they are on the verge of engaging in a battle that resembles the early PC wars for the hearts and minds (but mainly cash) of John and Jane Doe.
Battles aside, this is great news. The more competitors in the market the better. Hopefully this hot competition will produce the electronic reading device that seals the deal — a device so easy-to-use and convenient that it makes reading a paper book feel positively outdated.
Electronic Paper and Digital Paper
Devices like the Kindle and Sony Reader are great, but they aren’t enough. In order for paper to be completely replaced, we need to save a replacement that closely mimics its properties. That’s where e-paper and digital paper come in. Unlike electronic reading devices, electronic paper and digital paper are attempts at replacing the real thing. In general terms electronic paper attempts to mimic the look of ordinary ink on paper, while digital paper attempts to replicate the action of writing on paper.
Imagine a sheet of e-paper that for all intents and purposes looks like regular old tree paper. It’s lightweight, it’s bendy, it’s durable — except, it’s different. Not only does it let you write, by hand, as much as you want — when you get to the bottom of a page you just have to virtually flick on over to the next page — but it also lets you load up previously saved documents. It’s a briefcase, except it’s as thick as a sheet of paper.
We aren’t quite there yet, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. The Plastic Logic Reader is one example — in a recent BBC article they looked at how Plastic Logic is leading the charge in coming up with a paper killer.
The e-Generation
Some argue that the move to less paperless world is a generational thing. That it will only be achieve when the YouTube generation, who presumably aren’t as attached to paper books, grow up and take the lead. Maybe this is the case, but I also think that even baby boomers will want to make the switch in a few years, when the technology catches up with our needs.
For me, the switch to paperless paper is inevitable — and if you think that we’re still going to be using paper in 2020, like we currently do, then I — well I just don’t agree with you. It’s true, old habits die hard, but this habits days are truly numbered.
Read your docs out loud with SpokenText
Have difficulty seeing the screen, or maybe just sore eyes — heck, you might even want to make your own audiobooks — well, SpokenText has got all the answers (well, many of them so it seems) with its mostly free service for converting documents into audio recordings.
You can record PDF, Word, plain text, PowerPoint, RSS news feeds, emails and webpages into Podcast and MP3s.
Take a look at the demo I prepared earlier….
1. Original PDF: Use “Create Adobe PDF Online” to save as PDF
2. SpokenText MP3: Use “Create Adobe PDF Online” to save as PDF
A full subscription to the service removes the SpokenText advertising from the converted MP3, and also allows you to store the files in your account on the SpokenText server. You can then send links to these files rather than the file itself.
Worth a look…
Italian students ditch books for PCs
I wrote yesterday how I think that it is inevitable that electronic readers will ultimately replace paper textbooks in classrooms. Well today there is good news from Italy where a group of more than 60 children - aged between eight and 10 - will take part in an experiment which will see them use only computers for an entire year.
The experiment aims to test how computers can improve the leaning process.
Read the full story here: Italy pupils ditch books for PCs
