On Tue, 04 Sep 2012 18:47:46 +0200, andrel wrote:

>> I don't see a paperless society in place.  Do you?
> 
> partly, I am printing things about once a week or less. I used to print
> 3-4 documents a day. I do most of my revisions on screen.

Sure, we're getting closer, but I don't think we'll get 100% of the way 
there.  There's too much dependency on the "old" way of doing things 
(financial records, for example, in the US have to be kept for 7 years, 
and many of those are paper.  Expense reports at my last employer 
couldn't be handled without physical receipts being turned in, etc.)

> I do know these issues. As a matter of fact I often do receive faxes
> with ECG's on the fax in my room. That it happens does not mean that
> this scanning of paper versions is the common thing to do. By far most
> of my communication is digitally. So I am not paperless, but paper is
> only about 25% of my world now and that number is reducing fast.

Yes, but *the* world is where it's important. :)

> I was not talking about what you have, but about what you normally read.
> I also have many books printed before digital, just to show my age, but
> I don't read them as often as I do read things printed later.
> Also I don't see you wanting to scan any of those books. The point of
> having these is having these, not the reading. In 5 years time you will
> be reading them digitally if you want to read them again.

Many of them I do have in digital format, yes.

>> Can you read files in Envoy format?  I've got some materials in that
>> format as well - good luck finding a system that can read them. ;)
> 
> But do you also have the dead tree version of those?

One or two of them, yes.

> Do you want it as it was printed at the time or just the content?

The content is obviously the important thing.  But my point wasn't that 
we *could* be digital with stuff, but that we're not a paperless society, 
and the chance of us getting fully paperless are not that good until 
things that legislate hard copy or physical signatures on paper are 
done.  Given the speed with which the US legislature does anything, I 
expect it'll be a couple hundred years before the US has a chance at 
being paperless.

But then again, our legislature (at the national level) is somewhat 
regressive, maybe if we get more progressives in, we'll get there sooner.

Jim

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