We Will Part With Paper (and What That Means)

Posted by J.R.

September 12, 2009

Staples and Office Depot will go out of business. When we lost Circuit City, I saw it as clear as day. These companies are overwhelmingly being supplanted by centralized, catalog-based suppliers for office furniture and local liquidators/resellers. Kinko’s and FedEx/UPS stores will continue on the path of convergence and absorb some duties of these relics of the analog age for a time, but they will fade as well. Don’t worry; there’s time. Barnes and Noble and Borders will have to merge and die first. Amazon will be holding the candlestick in the parlor.

Don’t believe me? The Free Library of Philadelphia has lost its funding. That’s how the death of something starts: the most vulnerable public manifestation will have its funding slashed in a tough time, and even if the economy recovers, the government will not relinquish its grasp on those dollars. Books will stop having their own stores except for little independent shops, and these will persist as a novelty for generations. Unfortunately for them, they will fade in relevance as the pages yellow. Office supply stores are next.

You see, as bound books become less commonplace (and they are already outside of college campuses), they will be replaced by various e-readers. People will realize that reading words over a backlight is agony, and eInk will see a roar in revenue. If not, a competitor offering a similar product based on different patents will emerge and wipe the floor with eInk. The functionality will be the same though, and we’ll see color before long. Long before these devices are inexpensive and ubiquitous, offices will no longer require paper.

Already, digital distribution is streamlined and simple. The Kindle store, RSS, and Facebook are excellent models, but newer, more efficient infrastructure will replace them. Once eInk is at all viable, PDFs will be sitting in people’s hands like magazines, and finally users on the client side will be seeing what we on the publication assembly side have been looking at since Adobe Pagemaker; only at higher resolution.

Pictures on foldable electronic paper will move like those in Harry Potter newspapers. Sound functionality already exists in the Kindle. Adding video only requires an evolution of the display technology, which is simply a matter of time.

With HD Paper around, who needs the old tree kind? One sheet per person lasts for years. On a long enough timeline, digital paper becomes the most cost efficient option for businesses.

Say goodbye to staplers. Say goodbye to reams of 8.5×11. No more hole punchers. Say goodbye to newsprint. No longer will it be a privileged, rich few who have access to the press… It will be everyone. Mourn not these relics: the world will be better off without their resource consumption.

So what do we do in a world where everyone with a camera is potentially press, and everyone has a camera? We teach journalistic rights and responsibilities intelligently in school. We prioritize these things. We enter into a new age of accountability simultaneously with a new age of surveillance. None can say how society will react… except that it will be badly, as always.

It is imperative that we come up with an inexpensive method for backing up data that is not electronic or magnetic, which can be read from both analog and electronic devices. Why? Solar electromagnetic pulses. Recall the burning of the great library of Alexandria, and bear in mind that desperate humans post-EMP will burn what books are left for fuel and fun. Nearly all electronic data will already be completely gone. If you look up the history of solar EMP incidences, we do not know that stronger ones than were experienced in recent times are not likely or possible. When it comes to humanity’s wealth of knowledge, we should not be so callous as to think that we are immune to this potential loss.

The only way to keep electronic data remotely safe from a strong solar EMP event is to store and maintain copies in several disparate portions of the world.

What troubles me the most is that if we do lose everything, no one will be able to look back on these words of mine (and others) and say: “Those idiots knew it was a possibility, and still… they did nothing.”

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