OPINION: How long will it be before we see the true--dare I say it?--paperless office?
OK, a slight admission of age here: when I was a youngster pretty much all my information was gleaned from books, old chestnuts such as the "How and Why" series for example.
In the early 60s the dissemination of most information was indeed paper based.
I can still remember my parents buying our first black and white television. I was then receiving the nightly news "paper free" but precious little else on the box could be considered useful information.
However, it was at this point that I was made aware of the computer through various science fiction and cartoon shows. I was now old enough to read sci-fi books in which magical computers knew the answer to absolutely everything.
As an aside, I purchased my first non-kit PC, a Sinclair Spectrum in 1983 and when I took it home one of my flatmates asked me to hook it up and ask it what the capital of India was. I was amazed at the time that people still thought of a computer as an electronic "god" that knew all the answers.
Where I'm heading with this, of course, is the much-touted paperless office that has been a tired buzzword for decades now.
We are well past paper's projected use by date, where all our data is supposed to be disseminated electronically but, as I look around my desktop, cluttered with paper-based files and magazines; it just isn't so.
What went wrong?
One argument I have heard is that we are so inundated in information that the pile of paper on my desk represents a relatively small proportion of the total information that I have stored in my PC.
So while the office is not paperless it is certainly a lot less dependent on paper than it could be.
Paper is also so darned cheap (of course, ignoring the far from trivial environmental issues concerning the production of paper). You can buy quite a few paperbacks and newspapers for the cost of an eBook, although long term the eBook has the potential to be a lot cheaper.
And it's a fact that a flimsy piece of paper, when combined with a hundred or more other pieces of paper and bound up in a thin cardboard shell is a surprisingly robust item.
I have no qualms scrunching a magazine into a small space in my briefcase or tossing a paperback onto the back seat of my car and leaving it in the blazing sun for days on end. But I would tend to be a lot more careful with an eBook, for example.
What started this whole train of thought were the Document Management Systems (DMSes) in the February issue of Technology & Business magazine, and an article I happened across in Scientific America on "electronic paper".
As far as the DMSes are concerned, paper is here to stay and several companies are flat out developing electronic paper for quite a variety of reasons.
Primarily they feel that there are psychological advantages to an electronic display that consists of a collection of flexible paper-like pages, an electronic "paperback" that can display any book you like.
But to my mind the concept still has problems.
Why persist with the paper analogy? In the past an electronic tablet may not have been as familiar, but with the wealth of electronic appliances in the office and at home nowadays there are fewer technophobes.
I would also argue that a tablet with the same capabilities as an electronic paperback, other than the physical page turning, can be just as robust if not more so.
I would imagine a paper crease in your electronic paperback would be pretty catastrophic and, to top it off, still have the inherent problems of faulty electronics or flat batteries. The proposed products only include a few sheets of paper, not a whole book's worth, so I question the advantage of being able to physically turn pages anyway.
The technology involved in bringing the electronic paper to life is certainly very impressive and will have a wealth of potential uses such as flexible displays and signage, for example, but in the meantime and for the foreseeable future I'm quite happy reading my electronic books on my neat pocket PC.
Steve Turvey is Lab Manager of the RMIT IT Test Labs, and can be reached at stevet@rmit.edu.au.
The much touted Paperless Office, will happen about 5 minutes after the Paperless Toilet comes into existance.