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Visit Other Web Forums Is Paperless Possible? by Allen H. Kupetz Copyright © 2007 NOTICE: Essays and comments posted on World Future Society Web Forums are the intellectual property of the authors, who retain full responsibility for and rights to their content. For permission to publish, distribute copies, use excerpts, etc., please contact the author. My 14-year old son has terrible handwriting, something he likely inherited from his father who spent many hours of his own childhood – against his will – trying unsuccessfully to improve it. To his face, I encourage my son to take his time and to try to print more clearly so as to please his teachers. Privately, I lament that so much time is being spent on a skill that will end up in the dust bin of history next to the slide rule. This is not to suggest that people will stop writing, but rather that they will be able to stop writing in longhand if they so choose. The advent of the calculator didn’t mean that slide rules were outlawed, but simply that there was now a choice in the marketplace, and, over time, the newer product won greater acceptance because it served needs that the older technology did not. So too with the migration from paper to digital content. People will still have printers on theirs desks to change their bits into atoms, bring hard copy notes to meetings, and later file them away in manila folders. But they will be able to enjoy the cost savings, storage ease, distribution options, and eco-friendly aspects of going paperless if they so choose. The fact is, most of you are probably reading this on paper in the magazine delivered to your home. I still read a traditional newspaper every morning. Paperless doesn’t mean no paper. It means simply that technology is giving us options to reduce or eliminate much of the paper we use today so as to enjoy the cost savings of being paperless, the increased portability of ideas that are digitized, and to promote a greener way of doing business. Using recycled paper isn’t enough, given how much energy is used to recycle it. The Myth of the Paperless Office In January 2007, a tremendously innovative video by Michael Wesch, "Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us," was released on YouTube and quickly became one of the most popular videos in the blogosphere.1 It visually takes the viewer from paper, pencil and eraser to digital text, which is obviously the key tool in the paperless revolution.2 Also in January 2007, television commercials for two different U.S. companies show the opposite ends of the paper vs. paperless continuum. The first, for an office products company, shows two colleagues fulfilling their new year’s resolution to get their office organized by buying filing cabinets, bookshelves, three-ring notebooks, and shredders to deal with all the paper on their desks. The other commercial, for a printer/scanner company, has a group of colleagues in horror after learning that a sprinkler in the file room destroyed all their records, financial and otherwise. “How will we ever be able to comply with regulatory and audit requirements?” they bemoan. Fortunately, their IT colleague had previously scanned all the documents and stored them electronically for retrieval anywhere at anytime. Unless the first company bought waterproof filing cabinets, score one for the IT guy. The computer industry has been telling us for years that computers will enhance our productivity by making paper unnecessary. Walk into any large company’s headquarters, see the rows of file cabinets, and be confident that the paperless office is perhaps less likely – if that is possible – than before the computer age. Computers make it easier to produce paper, and employees are doing just that. So this ease, coupled with new regulatory requirements on publicly traded companies (e.g., Sarbanes-Oxley), has yielded more paper and more filing cabinets, bookshelves, and three-ring notebooks to hold it all. Equally anachronistic is the still all-to-common fax machine. Sascha Segan (2007) writes, “Think about it. Fax machines sell for $80 a pop. They don't get viruses or spyware. Their interface is a phone keypad, plus one (usable) button. When they don't work, the reasons are usually pretty obvious. And they feed stacks of paper.” In “Whatever Happened to the Paperless Office” Matt Bradley (2005) pointed out that he saw signs of progress in the near future, but he qualified the progress: For office innovators, the unrealized dream of the "paperless" office is a classic example of high-tech hubris. Today's office drone is drowning in more paper than ever before. But after decades of hype, American offices may finally be losing their paper obsession. The demand for paper used to outstrip the growth of the US economy, but the past two or three years have seen a marked slowdown in sales – despite a healthy economic scene. The real paradigm shift may be in the way paper is used. Since the advent of advanced and reliable office-network systems, data storage has moved away from paper archives. The secretarial art of "filing" is disappearing from job descriptions. Much of today's data may never leave its original digital format. In the same way that digital innovations have increased paper consumption, so has video conferencing – with its promise of fewer in-person meetings – boosted business travel. It's just common sense that the more you talk to someone by phone or computer, it inevitably leads to a face-to-face meeting. The best thing for the aviation industry was the Internet. “The most visible impact of a move to a paperless office is the reduction in the cost of printing, mailing, shipping and storing paper,” notes Joseph Anthony, author of the very useful Six Tips for a Paperless Office. “People who have been making photocopies, sending paper faxes, putting documents into legal sized folders – or saving mounds of mail and catalogues that they just can't part with – are going to have to change their perceptions.” If you need further motivation? A survey by furniture producer Steelcase found that 30 percent of white-collar workers still have private offices, but the size has shrunk from an average of 16x20 feet a few years ago to 8x10 feet today (Woyke, 2007). Getting rid of all those filing cabinets might make eating lunch at your desk a little less stressful.   Outside the Office  If the office is not an early-mover front on the war on paper, what other aspects of our lives might be? Commerce Consumer use of checks peaked somewhere in about the mid-1990s, according to the U.S. Federal Reserve (2002, 2004), but remained the dominant means of non-cash retail payments until 2003. The migration from checks to credit and debit cards, direct deposit, and automated clearing houses has greatly reduced the cost associated with processing each transaction. The further migration to a cashless society will reduce costs further.3 Going paperless for one’s personal finance is perhaps the best way to reduce the threat of identity theft. Liz Pulliam Weston (2007) notes: Identity theft experts have been telling us for years that sending sensitive financial documents through the mail is a bad idea. Paper account statements and credit card bills often give mail thieves all the information they need to hijack our finances. We can lessen the danger by buying a locking mailbox and depositing outgoing mail at the post office. But we can really limit the risk by going paperless. Education The current generation of middle and high school students, like my son, is generally more tech savvy than their teachers. I shudder when I see him tasked to buy an atlas, trace the continents five times and label all the countries. The labeling I understand for a ninth-grade geography class, but let them find and print blank maps from the Internet. Well beyond handwriting lessons, almost daily I see my kids asked to do things the way their teachers did them when their teachers were in elementary school. Certainly this is slowing the migration to paperless in the classroom. More importantly, it is a signal that some teachers are refusing to adopt technology to teach a new generation of learners that as a group would almost certainly be responsive to digital learning. Teachers have long feared that technology will replace them – which will never happen. We’re social beings and learning certain kinds of things is simply better when we’re taught by a human. But what will eventually happen is that teachers who can use technology will replace those who cannot. I teach MBA students, and one of my classes is completely paperless: no textbook; no hardcopy papers to turn in; and students can take notes directly on their laptops, which the school provides to all students as part of tuition. For those courses that require a textbook, I experimented with Zinio (http://www.zinio.com), which allows the author to protect his intellectual property through a basic digital rights management scheme while giving the student the feel of turning pages, being able to highlight relevant passages, etc. The biggest advantage is that the textbook could be downloaded for about 40 percent of the price of the hardcopy version; the disadvantage is that students can’t resell the book at the end of the term. In the end, my students – hardly a scientific sample – said they hated reading the e-book on their laptops and printed it out anyway.          4  For a course I teach on managing technology, there is a test on about 50 vocabulary words and terms that I think managers need to know like “disruptive technology,” 802.11, and WiMAX. I gave the students a traditional hardcopy test where they filled in the blanks and short answer segments in ink. For extra credit, I asked them a question I didn’t know the answer to: Given what we have discussed about wireless technology, peer-to-peer communications, Bluetooth, etc., please explain how I could have offered this exam paperlessly, but still prevented students from using their computers to look up the answer or help other students. This is a technology – not an ethics – question. None of their answers completely satisfied all the ways that electronic cheating could occur. The most common answer – don’t allow students to connect to the Internet via a cable and turn off the wireless capability that exists in all our classrooms – doesn’t solve other student-to-student connectivity opportunities like peer-to-peer 802.11, Bluetooth, and cellular text messaging. Next term I will give the exam paperlessly and rely on our strict integrity policy and my physical in-class monitoring. In 2007, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced it would make available the university's entire 1,800-course curriculum by year's end. Currently, some 1.5 million online independent learners log on the MIT site every month (http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html) and more than 120 universities around the world have inaugurated their own sites for independent learners. MIT has more than 1,500 course curricula available online to date (Gardner, 2007). This is certainly wonderful news for those who want information available to more people, more easily. For those with a different vision from MIT’s, the Internet is still forcing the old guard to go paperless (The Economist,“The Paperless Library,” 2005). It used to be so straightforward. A team of researchers would submit their results to a journal. A journal editor would then remove the authors' names from the paper and send it to their peers for review. Copyright rested with the journal publisher, and researchers seeking knowledge of the results would have to subscribe to the journal. No longer. The Internet – and pressure from funding agencies who are questioning why commercial publishers are making money from government-funded research by restricting access to it – is making free access to scientific results a reality. The value of knowledge and the return on the public investment in research depends, in part, upon wide distribution and ready access. Government Non-defense/public safety-related U.S. federal and state government agencies are notoriously slow to adopt new technology. Generally, they to seem to wait until the commercial marketplace has chosen its winners and prices have fallen as manufacturers reach economies of scale either through mass production (think personal computers) or through the commoditization of standards-based products (think 802.11 access points). As a taxpayer, this trend doesn’t bother me at all. The State of Florida (where I live) has, however, greatly reduced the amount of paperwork required to live here. I can renew my driver’s license online, pay the fees for my license plates, and purchase my annual business license all without filling out one piece of paper. The State does charge me US $7.50 to mail me a paper copy of my business license, which I wouldn’t need to pay if I could download it instead. More and more services are moving online, which means less waiting in line. I have no complaints.  Law The cliché that “ignorance is no excuse under the law” has certainly slowed the migration to paperless legal documents. Consumers simply don’t know what requires a traditional ink signature on a traditional piece of paper and when an e-mail or e-fax will suffice.5 According to Ethna Piazza, a lawyer and partner at Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton LLP, e-signatures of various sorts are perfectly legal. “Every time you click ‘buy’ on an online shopping site, for example, you're executing an e-signature.” And although e-mail isn't the best medium for executing contracts, it's possible to agree officially to something over e-mail (in Segan, 2007). Lawyers, as a group, have not been early adopters of new technology. The Blackberry seems to have a caught on as a way to increase billable hours, but two words best define where the legal profession is today regarding technology: Word Perfect. Medicine As the son of a practicing pharmacist, I remember the “can you read this” quizzes in his professional magazines to test a pharmacist’s ability to decipher a doctor’s penmanship on the prescription blank. The obvious potential risk in misreading what was written seems to me to be a great motivation to migrate to paperless. Digital prescriptions – sent directly from the doctor to the pharmacist of the patient’s choosing would also reduce fraud and could mitigate some risk to non-English-speaking patients. A recent medical drama on television had a Mexican woman overdose because she mistook “once daily” for 11 pills daily, once being 11 in Spanish. According to the CEO of Allscripts, a digital electronic health records company, “Prescription errors injure 1.5 million and kill 7,000 patients annually and most mistakes could be avoided if scripts were written electronically (Kher, March 2007). According to Gartner Group research, the problem with the U.S. healthcare industry as a whole is how little it spends on information technology. This is despite patient deaths following hurricane Katrina attributable to lost paper medical records (From Clipboards to Keyboards).   Books and Newspapers Just about everybody in both the entertainment and the technology worlds believes that it is the fate of all media to shed their analog past and transubstantiate into pure data. Newspapers are becoming websites, photos are becoming JPEGs, and songs are becoming MP3s. But what does this great digital awakening mean for the book?5 Nothing evokes a bigger reaction to the argument for going paperless than the notion it will mean the end to books, magazines and newspapers. I don’t see a product on the horizon that I’d take to a sandy beach in lieu of a traditional book. I subscribe to several weekly and monthly magazines, even though the content is often available digitally at the same time. I enjoy tucking them under my arm to read during lunch or while waiting in line. And I get a lot of my news online now, but still subscribe to the local paper. Paperless will not end the availability of getting the written word on paper any time soon. What it will mean is that some content available today on paper – phone books come to mind – will no longer be available, just as new music is not distributed on records or 8-track or cassette tapes. Think instead of the paperless revolution just as you think of the revolution in digital music. When compact discs (CDs) were the monopoly format for digital music, prices soared, and consumers had to buy a whole CD when all they wanted was a song. The .mp3 digital compression standard and file sharing sites like Napster ended that monopoly; consumers could obtain a single song. The tremendous success of iTunes shows that people will still pay for digital music if they can pick and choose the content. Note that iTunes songs that sell for US$0.99 each generate roughly the same per-song revenue as a US$16 CD. As with my students’ rejection of an e-textbook, the hardware piece of the equation has been the biggest stumbling block to broader acceptance. Amazon.com, the world’s largest seller of traditional paper books, began selling its new e-reader, the Kindle, in November 2007. It's not hard to see how Kindle will take off. Business travelers will be the first to embrace it. Having a device with multiple books, newspapers, magazines, and blogs to travel with, which also has a long battery life, beats wrangling a laptop, magazines, and papers in an airline seat. The next market will be university students. With such a nifty application and the tension over ridiculously high prices for textbooks, going digital is a brainy way to deliver textbooks to an audience that is already used to digital consumption. … Books don’t have to end and neither do authors’ revenue stream. If I sell my Kindle book to a reader for US $9.99, he has saved perhaps US $20 on the price of a hardcover book.6 E-Reader hardware needs software and, in this case, the Kindle needs content. Following the iTunes model, Amazon.com now sells the Kindle and digital content for it on its site. It promotes the value proposition this way:7 Revolutionary electronic-paper display provides a sharp, high-resolution screen that looks and reads like real paper. Simple to use: no computer, no cables, no syncing. Wireless connectivity enables you to shop the Kindle Store directly from your Kindle. Buy a book and it is auto-delivered wirelessly in less than one minute. More than 90,000 books available, including more than 95 of 112 current New York Times® Best Sellers, for just US $9.99, unless marked otherwise. U.S. newspapers including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post; magazines including TIME, Atlantic Monthly, and Forbes can all be auto-delivered wirelessly.  More than 250 top blogs from the worlds of business, technology, sports, entertainment, and politics all updated wirelessly throughout the day. Lighter and thinner than a typical paperback. Holds over 200 titles. Long battery life. Leave wireless on and recharge approximately every other day. Turn wireless off and read for a week or more before recharging. Unlike Wi-Fi, Kindle utilizes a high-speed cellular data network, so you never have to locate a hotspot.  No monthly wireless bills, service plans, or commitments. E-mail your Word documents and pictures (.jpg, .gif, .bmp) to Kindle for on-the-go viewing.  The Sony Reader, which predates the Kindle by a year, uses the same six-inch electronic paper that the Kindle does. It too is trying to do for the book what the iPod did for music – enable “the paradise of portable digital consumption."8 But in the “what were they thinking?” category, you can’t search the text of a book using the Sony Reader. Why would consumers migrate to e-books if they fail to provide the most basic advantage of digital text? Whether or not e-readers become more commonplace, the paperless revolution will mean – because the content is digitized – consumers can pick and choose what they want. If I only read the sports section and am willing to read it online, why should I have to pay for the whole paper and the cost to deliver it? If I want a single chapter of a text for my students, why can’t I have them buy just that chapter without the time, trouble and expense of photocopying that chapter and binding it to others? The incremental revenue to publisher is actually higher because I’d never ask the students to buy a whole book just to read a single chapter, but I might ask them to buy one chapter from 10 different books. In Japan, where long commutes on public transportation are the norm and vastly superior cellular phone networks to what we have in the United States exist, new services are constantly being rolled out: Sales of mobile-phone novels – books that you download and read, usually in installments, on the screen of your mobile phone – have jumped from nothing five years ago to over ¥10 billion (US$82 million) a year today (2007) and are still growing fast. Mica Naitoh, a popular author whose bestselling book had 160,000 downloads a day, says many of her readers never even buy old-fashioned books. For one thing, she says, today's trendy handbags are far too small.9  There are cultural issues in Japan – coupled with those long commutes and near 100 percent penetration rates for mobile phones – that makes reading novels on a mobile phone more likely than in other countries, but obviously a market exists, at least when a dedicated e-reader device is not required.  In the United States, where mobile penetration rates are smaller than Japan and the use of public transportation is substantially less, the Kindle might find a market. Without enough time passed to measure the Kindle’s success, the trend in the United States still seems to be using either a laptop or a mobile device. Hearst Corp.'s Seattle Post-Intelligencer plans to test software developed with Microsoft Corp. to let readers download an entire newspaper onto laptops and mobile devices running Windows software. Once the content is received, readers can view the material without being connected to the Web. Hearst said it may use the software to provide downloads of its other newspapers and magazines.10 Somehow I don’t think techie news junkies want old news offline. The bottom line is that books aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Consumers like them. (The book) is a more reliable storage device than a hard disk drive and it sports a killer user interface. No instruction manual or For Dummies guide needed. And it is instant-on and requires no batteries. Many people think it is so perfect an invention that it can't be improved upon, and react with indignation at any implication to the contrary.11  That said, Bill Hill, Microsoft’s point man on e-reading, offers this:  “We chop down trees, transport them to plants, mash them into pulp, move the pulp to another factory to press into sheets, ship the sheets to a plant to put dirty marks on them, then cut the sheets and bind them and ship the thing around the world. Do you really believe that we'll be doing that in 50 years?"12 Copyright: This paper is protected by the authors' copyright and may not be reproduced or distributed without the authors' permission. End Notes This video could be viewed at http://youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE as of 26 May 2007. Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State, also launched the Digital Ethnography (“that aspect of cultural anthropology concerned with the descriptive documentation of living cultures”) Working Group at Kansas State University to examine the impacts of digital technology on human interaction. For more about Wesch’s work, see http://www.ksu.edu/sasw/anthro/wesch.htm. For a detailed look at the impact of a cashless society, see Kupetz, “Our Cashless Future,” The Futurist, May-June 2007, pp. 36-40. Summers, Dana. Bound & Gagged, March 23, 2007.  Grossman, Lev. (2007). Reading Gets Wired. Kiley, David. (2007). Amazon Can Empty Bookstore Shelves. Retrieved December 22, 2007, from http://www.amazon.com/. Grossman, Lev. (2007). Reading Gets Wired. Japan's Latest Mobile Craze: Novels Delivered to your Handset. (2007). Lazaroff, Leon. (2007). Software Lets Readers Download Newspapers. Levy, Stephen. (2007). The Future of Reading. p. 57. Ibid., p.64. About the Author Allen H. Kupetz is the president of Kpartnerz, Inc. (www.kpartnerz.com) and the Executive in Residence at the Crummer Graduate School of Business (www.crummer.rollins.edu).  He served as the telecommunications policy officer for the U.S. Embassy in Seoul from 1992-96. Mr. Kupetz is the author of more than two dozen articles and international conference presentations on wireless technology. He has an MA in international relations from the University of Texas at Austin. Mr. Kupetz can be reached at akupetz@rollins.edu.   References, Resources and Additional Reading Anthony, Joseph. Six Tips for a 'Paperless' Office. Retrieved 26 May 2007 from http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/resources/technology/communications/6_tips_for_a_paperless_office.mspx Bradley, Matt. “Whatever Happened to the Paperless Office,” The Christian Science Monitor, 12 December 2005. Retrieved 26 May 2007 from http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1212/p13s01-wmgn.html “Do I Really Need a Paper Shredder to Protect Myself from Identity Theft?,” Wired Magazine, December 2006. Retrieved 26 May 2007 from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.12/start.html?pg=7 “Federal Reserve Studies Confirm Electronic Payments Exceed Check Payments for the First Time,” Federal Reserve Financial Services Policy Committee press release, 6 December 2004. Retrieved 26 May 2007 from http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/press/Other/2004/20041206/default.htm “From Clipboards to Keyboards,” The Economist, 19 May 2007, pg. 68. Retrieved 29 May 2007 from http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9196289 Gardner, W. David. “MIT to Put Its Entire Curriculum Online Free Of Charge,” Information Week,13 March 2007 . Retrieved 26 May 2007 from http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=198000568 Grossman, Lev. “ReadingGets Wired,” Time Magazine,30 April 2007 . Retrieved 26 May 2007 from http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1612700,00.html “Japan's Latest Mobile Craze: Novels Delivered to your Handset,” The Economist, 24 May 2007. Retrieved 26 May 2007 from http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_JNPTRGD Kher, Unmesh. “Chasing Paper from Medicine,” Time Magazine,30 March 2007 . Retrieved 26 May 2007 from http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1604858,00.html Lazaroff ,Leon. “Software Lets Readers Download Newspapers,” The OrlandoSentinel,23 February 2007. Retrieved 26 May 2007 from http://www.orlandosentinel.com/technology/orl-hearst2307feb23,0,5444086.story “The Paperless Library,” The Economist, 22 September 2005. Retrieved 26 May 2007 from http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_QQNPGQG Segan, Sascha. “Death to the Fax Machine,” PC Magazine,14 March 2007. Retrieved 26 May 2007 from http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2102956,00.asp Sellen, Abigail J. and Harper, Richard. The Myth of the Paperless Office (MIT Press, 2001). Retrieved 26 May 2007 from http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=8501 “The Use of Checks and Other Non-cash Instruments in the United States,” Federal Reserve Bulletin, August 2002. Retrieved 26 May 2007 from http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/bulletin/2002/0802_2nd.pdf Weston, Liz Pulliam. Go Paperless for Safer Banking. Retrieved 26 May 2007 from http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Banking/BetterBanking/GoPaperLessForSaferBanking.aspx Woyke, Elizabeth. “Wanted: A Clutter Cutter,” Business Week, 9 April 2007, pg. 12. Reader's Comments: • Excellent--wave of the future--now Hal Miller Email: hhhooke1923@gmail.com Submitted September 1, 2008 • Since before the Pentateuch, man has been wired for books. Anything with words that he can scan and has pages that he can thumb through and flip backwards and forth...(more at blog.fndbook.com) Michael Mannske mmannske@fndbook.com Submitted February 23, 2008 • One advantage of printed material not mentioned has to do with the "sharing issue." Printed material can be easily loaned to anyone. I don't think sharing with digital can ever be so free or easy. Jeff Henninger gwjeff61@fastmail.fm Submitted February 01, 2008