What is paper for?

On my way home from a proposal, I noticed that nobody on the proposal team had a large briefcase. Three of the six were toting laptops, and the rest had PDAs and smartphones. Where were the stacks of paper, the piles of bound reports? When did we go paperless?

The prospect and the disappointment of the paperless office are so old that it’s become a joke. Computers shrank, but printers grew, and software let us make more documents, and faster. We use less paper for everything we do, but we do more. So today, 45 trillion sheets are used annually, and offices with internet access use 40 percent more than offices that don’t. But, paper is losing ground. Here are a few of the reasons:

	Thumb drives – Everyone at the meeting had at least one. “Taking the work for a walk” is easier than ever. They’re cheap enough that they’ve replaced ball-point pens as the vendor giveaway of choice
	Multiple monitors – Desks now sport extra screens. For analysis of multiple data sources, it can’t be beat. Most data comes electronically these days, and a second monitor lets me analyze it without printing. A colleague just added a third.
	Filing – Digital files are better than paper ones. You can take them home, e-mail them, and search them. An entire lateral file drawer, in scanned form, fits on a single CD
	Good backup – Even home networks can enjoy automatic backup and offsite access. Check out the new generation of home network servers – you’ll be amazed
	Less space - Where would you put the paper anyhow, now that they won’t give you an office?
	Sustainability – Our client at this presentation had forbidden printed documents. We didn’t even exchange business cards!
	The death of FAX – Do you still put a fax number on your business card? Why?

This is not all good news. Thumb drives are great, but until now, I was not subject to the risk of putting my briefcase through the laundry. The absence of a dog-eared paper file makes it hard to remember what was important in a document – it all looks equally respectable onscreen. This leads to a question – In our digital world, what is paper for? It appears we now use it for four things:

	Proof – digital signatures have not yet become widespread in leases and purchases, though they do appear in appraisals
	Thinking – editing, commenting, and highlighting, as well as reading on the train
	Reliability– It’s hard to read word processing files from the 1980s, but paper documents still work just fine, and all of my clients can read them
	Nonlinearity – most people read magazines from back to front, and skip around in newspapers. This doesn’t translate well to onscreen documents (though it’s natural in blogs or websites)

And last, there’s the emotional effect of books. Their substance, heft, and cost tell us that someone cared enough about the ideas in them to spend a little time and money. We judge each other by the books in our homes and offices. I choose seatmates on planes based on books in hand. How will we strike up conversations, when our only remaining opening line is “That’s a nice screen?”