This little gem of a paper compares laptop computers and printed books head to head. It does this not to decry laptops, but to point out that the paperless office is as unlikely as the paperless home, or the paperless school, for that matter. Because a great deal of attention is being given to electronic education, particularly by bureaucrats who want to spend less on teachers so that they can spend more on their bureaus, a simple debunking like this paper could be valuable as ammunition against the naive ambitions so often held by committees and working parties.
While the World Wide Web is undoubtedly a technology-based development of great importance to that part of the world that can afford electronic devices and optical telecommunications, the technological support of publication on paper [1] could very well be of more global importance in the medium-term future, a future that needs cheap, robust, reliable communication (as typified by books) more than it needs relatively expensive, glitzy, ephemeral communication (as typified by the Internet).
As a footnote, the mail delivery that brought me this article also brought me New Scientist for 1 November 1997, which relates (p. 29) that IBM’s “Krishna Nathan has developed a device that allows people to write, doodle or draw with ink on a normal pad of paper and have it digitally recorded,” and that there are plans to have such a device on the market within six months. Hooray for traditional technology!?