| Paper & Screen Overview Printers > General > |  | Navigation Icons Guide
|
Paperless offices have been a long term dream - and with inceasing amounts of material in electronic form it might seem feasible. Hard disks and networks designed for audio / visual material can shift a screenful in a fraction of a second and a book in a minute.
Superficially it might seem strange that paper consumption has actually increased - people glance at things on screen then hit the print button.
People's continued preference for paper suggests they intuitively feel better able to comprehend paper.
Paper is used to record facts, pass on knowledge and to think things through. Until 1945 paper was the only way to do these things.
A step-change in administration happens in the mid 19th century
Paperwork creates problems - tedium, legibility, scale, lost ecords, lack of comprehension, poor cooperation and very significant costs.
Now seems to be happening.
Information starts in electronic form -keyed or aquired by instruments. Could be distributed immediately via the Internet. Paper remains the prefered medium - consumption roughly doubled as PCs rolled out.
It looks as though people could work from screens - making information less costly and available at it's point of use.
Going paperless hasn't worked well: Chiat-Day and HCI
Technical Limitations: - obvious problems were solved a decade ago:
Computers are ubiquitous - and are likely to take over the TV market as well.
Portable screens - notebooks, PDAs and e-books
Battery power - is a partial problem - especially with backlit colour screens
Network problems are part solved - Internet, WiFi, Cellphone. Connection is patchy
Portable screens aren't technologically perfect but they seem enough to replace paper.
Screen Limitations
People don't commonly quantify the differences between print and screens. Nor do they realise that such differences might disrupt human comprehension.
Screen resolution is a problem - its defined in pixels.
A4 paper works out at about 8 million pixels - roughly 2,400 x 3,300 at 300 dpi.
Screens on desktop computers are 1.3 million pixels 1280 x 1024. PDAs much smaller.
So a piece of paper has 6 times as many pixels as a screen - and an open magazine 12 times as many.
Difference in resolutions mean:
contextual information is more readily available on paper
individual characters are better formed
Reading is conventionally considered a linear process, but this is not necessarily what people do - especially with learning and business information.
People seem reasonably happy with the contextual information on A4 - if they wanted less then A5 would be more common.
Print preview can show 2 pages side by side - however the small text and badly formed characters may leave people struggling with character ecognition - limiting comprehension. Proof reading suggests exactly this problem.
What Else
Better Screens
Bigger better screens might solve the problem but even QXGA at 2048 x 1536 (3.1 million pixels) still falls short of what seems to be needed.
Big screens don't address the problem much. The HDTV 1920 x 1080 2 megapixel) standard give more information but the 16:9 ratio is the wrong shape for "paper".
Resolution remains a problem. The change from CRT to LCD has often meant a backward step to lower resolution - but better sharpness and contrast
Papers other talents
Paper messages
--
Storing Information
Paper is still one of the most popular ways to distribute and store information. Rising paper consumption might suggest its popularity is growing.
Disk Technology.
Hard disk is the definitive data store - 200 gigabytes for £50 in spring 2006. Capacity at the price point doubles every year or so. Technological advance is now being driven by the audio-visual market. Recent drives can hold the text equivalent of a large library. Future disks might hold all knowledge?
Paper Technology.
Paper has its own technological revolution - principally the growth in digital print and the ready availability of personal printers. Printing costs could be siginificantly reduced - but not at a rate to compare with disk.
Paper & Disk Costs
| Paper costs about 1p per A4 page and holds (at maximum) about 10,000 printes characters per page. |
| A 200 gigabyte disk costs about £50 and is equivalent to about 20 million pages of print (which would cost £200,000 as printed paper) |
A simplistic comparison suggests disk costs 4,000 times less than paper.
Crude comparrison might not work
Not everyone wants bulk information
Disks are often half full
Mere text isn't "information"
Some people don't want text.
Other confounding factors
| Computer costs - apply to paper as well as disk because computers substitute for typewriters |
| Pictures take more disk space - cutting how many pages a disk can store 100 fold. |
| Documents are pages scanned like pictures - cuts disk capacity 5-10 fold |
Storage - Data on Paper
Storing a little paper is rarely much trouble - although:
| People with a professional interest in information tend to find a need for several shelves of journals and textbooks - architects, doctors, engineers - and computer specialists for instance. (Computer specialists often have MORE paper) |
| Anyone who has to deal with client or customer, supplier and product information tends to wind up with a file per subject - which can be several thousand files and many hundred thousand pieces of paper. |
Storage costs for paper can easily mount up a million sheets of paper and need at least 100 metres of shelf - probably much more. The cost of storing paper can easily be double the cost of printing it.
The cost of filing paper can easily be 10 - 20 times higher still.
Storage - Data on Disk
Disks notionally don't take any space - because they are inside the computer.
However disks do need various backup strategies - RAID and tape - which add to the costs - BUT
| Not everything truly needs backup (wheras all paper needs shelving) |
| As computer systems grow the proportion of the cost spent on replication equipment and backup can fall. On a hundred -machine network the cost of replicating server data is minor compared with the rest of the installation. |
Archives are a potential problem - disks and tapes gradually decay.
Summing Up Storage.
Disk may need backup and replication - but so does paper (in principle).
Disk storage of data costs much less than paper - exactly how much is arguable - but of the order 100th and 1,000th.
Storing data on paper makes diminishing sense, but it does depend on circumstances -
a lot of stuff is on paper and filing it is quicker than scanning it (still often a good argument)
clerical staff in a small office would otherwise be partly idle (might happen!).
people can't read and digest information well on screen - they need files (key issue)
Distribution, Filing & Retrieval.
Paper is good at display.
Disks good at storage
Distribution, filing and retrieval is the point
People might think computer information would be similar to the printed page. This is because:
| the most popular programs are word processors - intended to print pages |
| paper related ideas are often used as a metaphor to help computer users |
Computers are actually very unlike paper: everything is binary
Information in Electronic Form
Filing Paper - Diaries, Daybooks, Shelves & Cabinets
Most people dislike filing paper.
Printers, Screens & Reading.
Computer screens are becomming ubiquitous, as a result people could have access to almost limitless information anywhere.
A point that doesn't get noticed much is that screens usually show much less information than a piece of paper - they may be bright and colourful but a big screen typically has about a sixth the number of pixels of the crudest piece of printed A4. Small screens show much less.
Several academic studies suggest that reading information from screens significantly reduces people's comprehension and retention of information. The reduction in performance measured by comprehension tests seems to be of the order 20%.
Users appear to have some awareness of the effect - they will often print information "to read it properly". Potential problems are:
| Users appear to be only partly and erratically aware of the effect and may deny it. Some people do seem to find information on screens more enjoyable - perhaps its the light and colour - that doesn't mean they are immune. |
| There may be social, financial or environmental pressure on users not to print because "screens are the future" or to save money or trees |
The shift to screens could significantly impair a lot of people.
Reading & Writing
Pronounceable words turned to easily drawn symbols and back. The methods used for symbol to speech transformation differ with culture - but in each human culture they are de-facto standards and appear to be irreversible investments.
Reading - there seem to be flaws in the system or in how it is taught - a significant minority remain illiterate. There are also claims that people can learn to increase their reading efficiency.
There is research into reading efficiency in terms of layout, fonts, emphasis and learning strategies - but not a great deal considering how important the issues are.
Writing - people and computers both write much less than they ead.
Handwritten Latin script uses of the order 15-20 actions per word and is much slower than speech. Handwriting at a speed acceptable to the writer tends to be unreadable - so typewriters grew in popularity. PCs are cheaper and easier to type on.
Computer Learning & Techno-Optimism
Screens look as though they should have advatagages over books and blackboards. In theory all knowledge is just a mouse-click away.
Computer Assisted Instruction, Simulation, Multimedia, Hypermedia and Social software
Computers & Education
Ted Nelson's "Computer Lib" (ultimately inspired the Web)
Seymour Papert's Logo
OLPC project
In the last few years there has been pressure to interpret education as screens. BUT:
Computer screens may be good at communicating well designed information - but not all information is well designed.
Screens may reduce comprehension and retension even with well designed information.
Information and Design - ideally information might be designed for its purpose. Unfortunately designing information very well tends to make it expensive to produce and give it a very narrow focus.
Motivations for learning vary but lots of people seem to need a teacher.
/////
People reading a novel tend to proceed in an orderly fashion reading through the narrative. Their eyes sometimes move elsewhere on the page, and sometimes they flick back a page or so to refresh their memory of something.
People reading work documents - catalogues, reports, textbooks - very arely proceed in an orderly fashion. They skip bits, stop and go back, ead the summary at the end before the introduction.