"We are on the verge of endless information becoming available anywhere, anytime. And the change that this is going to bring about in society is every bit as fundamental as the change the printing press brought about."
I just read the above quote on the Microsoft eBook Web site, and I can't help but to wonder what is really going to happen in the coming years to document printing and distribution. Just as the proponents for a paperless society predicted the demise of paper, many opponents to this concept are now claiming a victory for paper. The reality will certainly fall somewhere in between.
Since the dawn of man, we have been using documents (paper, stone tablet, etc.) to share knowledge with one another. Paper is the ultimate delivery vehicle for exchanging ideas and recording information. Paper is wonderful because it's incredibly cheap, it's a universal standard, it's easy to see and read, it's very portable, it's reliable and incredibly easy to use.
Paper is not going away unless its replacement has those same features. Impossible? Some companies don't think so. While the end goal for these technology companies is the replacement of paper, they are focusing their efforts on the replacement of the traditional delivery process first. Here are a few that you are probably familiar with:
E-mail has had a profound impact on information sharing. Along with word processing, it brought the computer age to offices everywhere. It has been standardized so that once you have a computer with e-mail, knowing someone's e-mail address is all you need to get information to them. It also has many other things that we like about paper, but it falls short in many areas. E-mail has been very successful in becoming a dominant method of delivering documents and information; however, most people print e-mailed messages or attached documents when wanting to file or share the information. They convert it to the medium with so many great strengths, paper. It could also be argued that e-mail has replaced phone calls and meetings as much as it has replaced paper.
Recent models by the large copier companies have the ability to scan and e-mail a document to a recipient or to another printer. Of course, the recipient often prints the document. When this happens, the document is actually printed twice: once before it was scanned and once by the recipient. The cost savings is in the delivery. A computer network is much more efficient and faster than physically delivering the · document. In today's world, people want things now, and in the future, they will want it yesterday.
There is no doubt that people print more now than ever before. The big surprise is where they are printing. More and more people are printing to their desktop and workgroup printers. The reason leveraging a computer network to deliver documents. Within an organization, moving documents electronically has already been established where computers and program standards are controlled. It's easy to send a report created in Microsoft Word to fellow workers if you know they also have a copy of Microsoft Word with which to look at it. Standardization is the key to electronic delivery.
The pure text of e-mails is great for ideas, messages and conversation, but it isn't well suited for documents that require precise layout and wording. One type of computer file you will be hearing a lot about in the future is the portable document format (PDF). When a document is made into a PDF file, it maintains the look and feel of a paper document. This means that the layout, pictures and fonts are consistent regardless of the machine on which it is being viewed. Even better, since the viewer is free (Adobe Acrobat), anyone can view a document in this format. Using this technology, a document can be sent, viewed and printed at virtually no cost. It offers standardization that only requires the document creator purchase a piece of software.
In the next 20 years, this will move toward consumers as more people gain access to e-mail, the Internet and high-speed networks. New standards will continue to pave the way as well. You have probably heard the buzzword "electronic bill presentment" more than you'd care think about, but it will eventually become practical.
When will paper be replaced?
Many companies are spending millions of dollars trying to create an "electronic paper" that is cheap, easy to read, standardized and reliable.
Xerox, Lucent Technologies with E Ink and IBM have created electronic paper technologies hoping to tap into the incredible potential of an electronic paper market. These technologies share remarkably similar benefits to paper. They are lightweight, thin and very portable. In fact, they look just like paper. Xerox has invented a thin plastic-like page that can be "charged" with a black and white page image. IBM recently developed a thin, flexible color display panel that many experts feel could be adapted into a color "digital" paper. While it doesn't have all the strengths of paper, it is reusable and would allow thousands of pages to be carried within a single sheet "display."
Perhaps the biggest challenge to all these technologies is the issue of standardization. Even if you could create the perfect electronic paper, how would you get everyone to use it? Even more difficult, how would you make money selling it? Most of us have experienced sticker shock when buying inkjet printer cartridges. Can you imagine paying for paper usage "refills?"
This doesn't mean that electronic paper will fail. Like e-mail, it would probably be adapted within organizations for specialized applications. There are interesting possibilities in areas such as store price tags, billboards and mounted art to name a few, but making it a universal standard would be unthinkably difficult.
The bottom line is that the ways of creating these documents have changed, but we still physically deliver nearly every document that goes from B2B or B2C. But that's what the mailing business is all about the delivering of knowledge and ideas.
The mailing industry has countless numbers of people with an amazing capacity to understand their business. I don't have any mailing expertise, and every time I work with mailing experts, I am amazed at their knowledge of specific details. There is no doubt that the mailing industry does a fantastic job of delivering documents.
The challenge for the mailing industry in the future is this: Will the experts in physically delivering documents also become major players of other methods of delivering documents?
Heath Cajandig is the digital production manager for Printing Services at the
