The future of…

Click here for contact details, other articles and personal details

The future of paper

Feb 1999

If paper were only invented recently, it would be hailed as one of the most important advances this century, alongside the computer, car or aeroplane. It is a superb medium. It is flexible enough to withstand being crumpled and unfolded. It supports a very high contrast ratio and is compatible with virtually all printing, copying and manual writing devices. It can hold a gigabyte of information on a single A4 sheet, and paper tape offers the cheapest form of archive data storage for computers. The information is retained perfectly for centuries. It is recyclable and biodegradable. It requires no power to maintain the image and never crashes. It never needs an upgrade and is fully millennium compliant. All this and it is so cheap as to be totally disposable. And yet in the age of IT it is despised as an obsolete medium. I believe it is on its way to major reduction, but a long way from its death.

Appropriate IT use in business rightly eradicates paper from administrative and distributive systems. Electronic information can be manipulated and distributed more easily and is easily transferable between systems. Information in paper form is largely fixed in time and location so it can't compete here. However, for readability, paper wins just as conclusively against today's poor display technology, with its poor resolution, contrast and ergonomics. Using the two in parallel appropriately has meant that we have seen paper use grow rapidly with the electronic age, not decrease. Information is processed and transferred electronically and occasionally printed out for human input. It will be several years before electronic paper is sufficiently cheap and usable to replace paper as a widespread reading medium.

But there are now strong efforts to combine the best of both worlds and electronic variants will catch up to a point. One form of electronic paper uses tiny cells full of particles that can be manipulated using electric charges, making the pixels any colour. With sufficient of these, resolution is adequate and contrast can be high. Several other technologies are competing to achieve the same goal, and it remains to be seen which will win. The electronic paper is flexible and portable. It still needs batteries of course, but it offers some of the convenience of paper, with the versatility of the electronic medium. As is always the case with new technologies, some companies have missed the point though, and are binding several sheets of the stuff together to make an electronic book. I will be extremely surprised if this idea doesn't flop. One sheet is perfectly adequate, and there really is no point in trying to mimic all the characteristics of paper, just its advantages. All the functions of flicking through and so on can easily be implemented with appropriate ergonomics. I would be very happy to buy my books in electronic format and to read them on electronic paper if it is high enough quality.

Paper books will continue to exist too, though there is a lot of substitution potential. My 4-year-old daughter has many paper and electronic books, but doesn't have the same ones in both forms, so the electronic books have replaced the paper versions. With the paper ones, she can scribble on them, rip pages out, carry bundles of them around, sort them all out and compare all the pictures on the covers. Her play with the electronic books has virtually no overlap apart from the story, which is only a fraction of the product in both cases. This is also true of adult books. I will never buy a multi-volume paper encyclopedia, and regularly purge my paperbacks from the shelves to make space. I will happily buy novels in electronic form in due course. But I won't throw away my beautifully bound hardbacks because they are a pleasure to own and use. The well bound paper book is more than just a medium for the words.

Magazines on the other hand are more at imminent risk. They are transient, heavy, bulky and inefficient in presenting their information, while remaining expensive to produce and distribute. The electronic personalised magazine on electronic paper will become infinitely more attractive. They will need a single sheet, with high resolution and full colour, with all the advantages of personalisation, including advertisements. All the content of your books, magazines and newspapers could be carried around on this one sheet, all enhanced by video and sound where appropriate, all with easy hyperlinking to more content on the internet. Unlike a magazine, you will be able to move between content in several magazines. Also, new marketing options will arise, such as pay per read, which will doubtless have a positive effect on content.

Paper will remain the best solution for many applications though. Yellow slips, birthday cards, the scented love letter, and many other paper products will probably stay paper for quite some time, though new solutions will appear alongside. It is unlikely that electronic paper will become as disposable a medium as paper for many years, if ever, so 'real' paper will still be used for quick notes and scraps to pass information to someone else. Business cards and post cards may have electronic data on them, read by machines, so we will see many paper/digital hybrids. Even magazines could be printed in highly compressed digital form on a single sheet and sold in newsagents, read into your electronic paper by a scanner, an alternative to network delivery. Or maybe you take the card to the till and the electronic form is downloaded there and then.