Microsoft invested a lot of time and money in the late 1990s in an attempt to move readers to the screen. Microsoft aimed to popularise their "Reader" software and "OpenBook" ebook format. At it's launch in August 1999 Dick Brass their Vice President for Technology said "We're on the verge of a fundamental change ... It's not Star Trek anymore. It's really going to happen" and predicted that more than half of all book titles would be sold electronically within 15 years.
Bookshops and libraries aren't finding ebooks replacing paper. There is a lot of information on line. University libraries have a lot of material on CD but it tends to be a reprint of learned society material in more convenient form. Libraries have more and more screens, but people seem to be using them to access general Internet pages, not to read online books. In the last few years more books have been published than ever before
Quite a lot of businesses are promoting various "speed readers" and comprehension aids. As with speed-reading promotions and books advertised in newspapers evidence seems to be that increasing speed on unfamiliar material is bought at the cost of reduced compehension
seem to be the usual problems that these don't are quite a lot of people
Screens
The idea that computer information should be viewed on a screen is commonplace and indeed every desktop and notebook computer has a screen. Alternatives such as audio output are possible but seem limited. Very few sighted people choose to have a typed report read as audio by their computer, although it is technically easy to do and may be effective. 
Screens were based on CRTs until very recently. CRTs are big, heavy and almost innevitably desk bound. A person reading on a desk based screen has very little freedom of movement. LCD flat screens and notebook computers are taking over but they still don't entirely solve the problem - indeed they create a new one because the amount of information shown can be more limited.
Computer screens are great for short, bright, punchy messages, the sort of things put in sales brochures and pop lyrics. Computer screens are fine for records - the database related stuff of business and government transactions.
Photographs look good - and you can use a screen as nothing but a picture-album if you want.
However screens are poor for getting more complicated information in context.
There just isn't enough space on a typical screen for reasonable maps or satellite photographs (despite Google's efforts). Screens can't show detail and context at the same time. There usually isn't support for learning strategies like underlining or highlighting. People can't easily put something aside and come back to it, they can't scribble on it or bend down the corners.
A problem with screens is that they typically show less than half the information that would be on a paper page. Even a good screen struggles to show an outline of two A4 pages side by side - which is the display a single magazine or catalogue gives without any fuss.
A further problem is that you can't flip back and forth with a screen. People don't necessarily read in a systematic way even with a novel; they flip back to remind themselves of something, flip forward to see where the chapter ends. Scrolling back with a screen is slow, pageup -pagedown tends to leave the user dissoriented and they lose their place.
Paper Preferred
//Note copied above//
There is very little question that paper is still preferred. Printing paper consumption in the "advanced" economies oughly doubled as the microcomputer became popular. Newsagents shelves are full of magazines, not CDs (CDs are stuck to the front of magazines). In bookshops the computer section is often one of the biggest.
Paper may partly be a matter of habit. Until very recently youthful learning experiences at home or at school have used books not screens (TV is a very different experience to a computer screen).
Paper may also be psychologically better as a way to learn things. Many people like to print any long piece of text, certainly if it has any complexity, ather than stare at a screen. There is some evidence that it's not just lack of screen area and of resolution but a whole raft of other things - eye movements, distraction by layout and icons, disorientation caused by scrolling and the generally rather clumsy way the Window, Icon and Mouse desktop metaphor works.
A big boost in paper consumption has been people creating things with computers then printing them. Essays, e-mails, diagrams, draft reports and photographs are the kind of things people print. This sort of material was placed on paper before computer printers, but new technology makes it easier.
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The growing cost benefit of electronic media ought to mean a decline in the need for printing, but this may not occur:
- In the last 20 years the exact opposite has happened - people take information held on disk - glance at it on the screen, and then print it out.
- A lot of printing is for decoration rather than information. The computer industry is terribly earnest about "data" - but suppose an inkjet printer is printing wall-paper. It's a perfectly valid use but it isn't conveying "information" in any conventional sense.
Other uses for computer-driven printers will emerge wallpaper has been mentioned - printing patterns on fabric is becomming well established.
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If you're not a bookish person you might decide instead to make a movie of your life - not just a one hour autobiography but the whole thing from beginning to end. There might be a problem finding production staff and viewers might flick to the salacious bits - but someone has to be the first in history to have the the prospect of judgement day here on earth.
More mundanely the vast capacity for storage makes all sorts of organisational and social changes possible. Office systems developed a decade ago around paper records have come to seem wasteful taking up a large floorspace, having long retreival times and - if they are any size - having large clerical staffs.
The first mechanical aids to calculation were devised by Herman Hollerith a hundred years ago. The data produced by the US Census threatened to overwhelm any manual approach to calculating results so Hollerith came up with mechanical punch cards, sorters and counters. It proved a brilliant idea and over the next 50 years governments and large businesses all over the world bought tabulating equipment from the company that became IBM.
Punch cards
Holding information on computer disk and tape can seem spectacularly cheaper than holding it on paper.
Computer disks have a growing advantage over paper as a storage medium. Things may not be quite as simple as they seem, however.
First of all, disks aren't free standing human readable media - you need a computer to read the disk and a screen to view the information.
Disks for computers come in all shapes and forms - CD, floppy, cartridge. The most common way to hold information is the "hard disk" so it seems fair to use it as a base for calculations - even though CD-R is cheaper. A 200 gigabyte hard disk now costs under £50.
"Pages" are the common way to handle paper information. Unfortunately the idea of a page doesn't have much meaning in computer terms although it can be interpreted as a "screen". Screens aren't even vaguely similar to paper pages -
Aspect ratio is the wrong way round, most screens are wide rather than tall.
Coding a page is quite different to the physical object - although it is related to typing. In ASCII code a pair of formfeed (FF / Chr 12) characters gives a blank page. The same thing can be done with 66 carriage return / linefeed pairs (Chr 13, Chr 12).
It seems fair to suggest that disk can store better than 100 pages per penny - and given the falling cost of disk the advantage will continually improve.
On a day by day basis disk has an advantage, however things aren't quite straightforward.
Disk hardware is quite reliable these days but all disks are mechanical and will fail. Mirroring a disk (duplicating content on another) doubles the cost. RAID striping and mirroring probably doubles it again because although only one more disk is needed dedicated hardware controllers tend to drive up costs. To get an offsite backup using tape could even double costs again - so disks advatage has been divided by 8!
There are further complexities. Only a few businesses have 10 GB of original data - any more than they have a million sheets of paper. It is difficult to buy a disk smaller than 10 GB and (as at mid 2006) it is easy to buy 200GB of capacity for £100. However the problem of needing 3 disks, a RAID controller and tape backup remains. The most economical way to provide these things is in a network server. The server might meet the needs of ten or more departments - or conceivably of ten or more distinct businesses - so that means costs decline tenfold again. But then what if the server fails? What if theres a fire, flood or earthquake? Having three servers in different towns connected by a broadband network gives the same sort of redundancy given in one server with three disks - but of course costs keep going up.
This brief outline of the potential costs of computer store suggest that computer storage is a fraction of a penny per page. Practical costing depend on the technologies used, on how much of the potential storage space can actually be used for any sensible business task, how many duplicate copies people make of things and what the backup strategy is.
Superficially disk store can beat any competitor. The domains epresenting bits on hard disks are currently about 50 nanometers across and it appears possible to shrink them further. This is actually a potential problem with hard-disk because if the disk were put in storage the domains are so close to one another that the magnetic fields gradually influence one another and die away.
Optical disk domains are larger - more like 700 nanometers across for DVD. A pre-printed DVD is an aluminium sheet in a polycarbonate disk so it should be robust and not self destruct. Early CDs suffered from sulphur migrating into the disk and eating the metal. Writeable CD and DVD uses a chemical reaction which is fairly stable. Rewriteable CD and DVD use changes in the crystalisation of metals - crystal forms aren't always stable, particularly at a micro-scale.
Microfilm stores small photographic records that are more like computer printout than any ordinary storage media. Microfilm is normally used for human-readable output, but can be adapted to digital data as well - its not standard so it's expensive. Ordinary microfilm has some advantages because it's long term stability in cool dry conditions is known to be good. Furthermore a microfilm is readable with a microscope - so even if an electromagnetic pulse weapon or a breakdown in civilisation were to destroy all existing computers the microfilm records could survive. Some large companies and government departments use microfilms for this kind of reason.
Storage Space
Space for storage clearly favours disk. In fact paper is often not bound into neat books but held in ledgers and pendaflex files, so it doesn't pack very tightly at all.
A disk is pocket sized. Even built into a computer with a monitor and keyboard the disk only occupies a square metre or so of desk space. Since space is often a very significant operating cost to a business paper looks like a poor option.
Page versus Screen
Paper is the first low cost, zero-power, permanent memory, lightweight, foldable, high resolution computer display. Paper may become obsolete, and when it does the market for computer printers will decline, but convincing technology seems to be a long way off at the moment.
Resolution
Paper can show a lot of information in a small area. The working area of an average 17" computer screen is just a bit bigger than a "landscape" piece of A4, but it can't display anything like the same information. For instance it can't show the page in it's normal "portrait" orientation. (Screens that swivel between landscape and portrait have never eally caught on).
The dot pitch on a screen is typically 0.26mm. The dot pitch for a printed page is under 0.1mm - so paper can hold more detailed information in the space. It takes a big, high quality computer screen to match the look of a magazine page. No screen can truly display the equivalent of a printed page with really fine detail -( but then no printed page can have a scale icon in the corner ready to display any level of detail).
To display a lot of information a computer screen generally needs to be big and heavy - or very expensive. A CRT monitor with a 17" screen is quite likely to be more than 18" deep, so it takes up a lot of desk space. LCD screens bigger than 15" and with esolutions towards the 1600x1200 expected of a large CRT monitor are just starting to appear, but they are still expensive. No screen -either CRT or LCD based - comes close to displaying the amount of information that can be held on the page of a newspaper or map.
Screens are uncomfortable to look at - partly because they are so big. A bulky object on a desk is quite difficult to eposition. The angle most screens are placed at isn't very natural either. When we are reading from paper we position it at a comfortable angle - almost never at the angle adopted by computer screens. Monitor arms can make screen positioning more flexible and easy, but few of them cope well with a big monitor.
A lot of CRT screens flicker uncomfortably, or reflections distract from the image. A computer screen is quite unlike a television because people concentrate on small part of it and their eyes are not distracted by movement - so the screen has to be very good to be acceptable for any length of time.
The comments above mainly apply to bulky CRT monitors and their days are drawing to a close. LCD screens are lighter and flat - but LCDs come of badly in most of the following comparisons.
Zero Power
Some properties of paper seem hard to beat. Once an image is printed it is static and takes no power. Paper provides:
- a permanent record - technically, paper can be de-inked but paper actually forms a good, legally trustworthy "memory" of transactions.
- the ability to write and read under hostile circumstances - survey sheets written in a high street in the pouring rain may not be very eadable, but would a computer survive?
- flexible positioning - books and magazines can be read in the bath, on a train or in bed. A notebook computer has some of this flexibility, but the batteries keep running down. Never use a notebook in the bath - if it survives the HT for the screen could kill you!
- foldability - a piece of A4 easily folds to pocket-size.
- low cost - so cheap it is disposable - regretable quantities make their way to landfill tips.
If a web-connected computer is such a brilliant source of information why is the computer section one of the biggest in the bookshop?
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Ink Impact
Printed and drawn images have lots of obvious and subtle details that help the communication along. One of the things paper is good at doing is setting a new "context" by it's look and feel.
Paper & Perception
Printed material has been around for a long time, so there are a lot of cultural expectations as to what it should look like. For instance, people would not accept a newspaper printed entirely in capitals on green lined computer paper. Such a newspaper might be perfectly eadable and contain all the text of the "Sun" or the "Times", but it just wouldn’t feel right. It would be possible to produce a will or the deeds to a house on a cash-register tally roll - perfectly printed and perfectly legal, but not acceptable. Equally, people don’t expect a supermarket receipt to be printed on A4- even though it could be much more informative.
For some time the computer printer was quite successful in producing a paper style and cultural image of its own - the green lined paper mentioned above. People tolerated enormous sheaves of "print-out" on fan-fold paper even though they were difficult to handle and store. A whole genre of special office furniture was created to store print-out. However the need for special stationery is fading, many printers now deal with standard paper sizes.
Although there have been a great many paper sizes and styles the trend is to handle just two: A3 for diagrams, A4 for written material. Standardising on paper sizes simplifies purchasing and storage, but it does sacrifice some of paper's context setting capability.
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A normal human eye can cope with any size of writing in between the smallest footnote and tabloid headlines. In correspondence and reports text is usually arranged in lines about 1/6th of an inch high, with approximately ten characters to the inch. The size of A4 paper therefore dictates that a page is about 80 characters wide and at most 66 lines long - a page of solid print can therefore contain 5280 characters.
The human eye reading a page does not generally pick up details less than 1/300th of an inch across, so black and white printed material will look reasonably good if it achieves or exceeds this esolution. The smallest pens used by professional draughtsmen are 0.1mm (1/250th inch). Almost all computer printers work by placing dots on the paper. Old dot matrix printers achieve about 100 dots per inch and the print looks crude. Recent laser printers can place 2,400 dots per inch - so the dots are smaller than the grain of the paper. Print resolutions this high may seem a bit ridiculous, but they are actually used to provide a grey-scale so that the printer can reproduce photographs.
A piece of A4 printed at 300 dots per inch contains about 8 million dot positions – equivalent to a megabyte of memory. Ten years ago this much memory was expensive, so many older printers have far less.
People quite often want bigger pages and there are uses for finer lines. A3 paper at 1200 dpi requires 253,440,000 dots – about 32 megabytes. Introducing CYMK colour could quadruple that number to nearly a billion dots. Clearly if these dots are produced individually the act of printing is not a trivial mechanical or data-processing task. Actions set in motion by pressing "print" in Windows are deceptively simple.
Human requirements in terms of perception and tradition set what the market requires of computer printers. Printer manufacturers move to meet demand. Making printers involves a substantial amount of electronics and mechanics, and a large investment to make the special consumables. Printer manufacturers are then able to compete on price using the scale economies they achieve in manufacturing and distribution. But the manufacturers cannot simply set about dreaming up the ultimate printer, then build this to a price. All printer designs are limited by what is technically possible at a given price. This is a continually moving target as better semiconductors and micro-engineered mechanical components become available.
Ergonomics and Information Overload
Information Overload
Most organisations today, however, deal with a mixture of computer and paper.
The ergonomics of dealing with information in both paper and electronic form can be rather poor. In a paper-only system people can know which shelf and which ledger holds a record.
The computer can introduce uncertainty - if the paper ecords a
E-mail the Web and EDI are coming into use. Keyboards and printers are the main bridgeheads between the two media.Nevertheless a users frequent reaction on finding an interesting web-page is to print it out. Scanners, OCR software
In the absence of adequate Electronic Data Interchange systems, printers are also the link between an organisation and the outside world. A well printed document should help build a good image for an organisation. A well-presented web-site is still second-fiddle to paper.
Business printers intended for desktop use have generally fallen in price about 3-fold during the last decade, with capabilities that would have cost over £1000 in 1988 costing about £300 in 1998. Laser printer prices fell more rapidly - the capabilities that would have cost £5000 in 1988 cost about £300 in 1997.
Consumer market printers can be exceptionally cheap. The Star LC10 colour dot matrix machine retailed for around £100. Cheaper machines will probably be produced- the manufacturing complexity of an inkjet printer is similar to that of a portable cassette ecorder, so given similar volumes a consistent retail price well under £50 should be attainable.
Printer manufacturers are beginning to run into a downward price spiral where each undercuts the other until a £50 price is achieved. At the moment they are avoiding this by putting more features into their machines –such as photo-realistic colour and the ability to use metallic inks.
Special- purpose printer prices do not necessarily fall. There are fewer economies of scale and not so much competition. Tally roll printers for shops, wide A0 printers for draughtsmen, credit card and CD- label printers carry high prices that might not decline.
Printing has always been part of the computing business. Some of the earliest designs for automatic printers date back to Charles Babbage’s designs in the 1830s. Early electronic computers in the 1950’s and 60s made use of modified typewriters and teletypes - the workhorses of the computer industry for many years were the teletype KSR33 and the IBM Selectric Golfball Typewriter. Laser printers dominate the market today – and may continue to do so where low page prices are a requirement. Inkjet technology can be more flexible. A colour inkjet printer can produce pages nearly good enough for a commercial magazine.
This briefing document gives an outline of the main computer print technologies:
- High speed, high volume basic printing for business forms is provided by bandprinters.
- Dot matrix printing offers medium speed, letter quality low cost copy on multipart stationery. Dot matrix machines are good for business forms and correspondence.
- Thermal printers provide a high level of flexibility and a very cheap mechanism. They are used in faxes, label printers and instrumentation.
- Inkjet printers can provide fairly high speed at fairly high copy cost, but they give laser quality and convincing performance in colour. Inkjet is a young technology that may take most of the market in the long term.
- Laser printers can provide high speed and high precision. However the laser printer’s basic electrostatic mechanism tends to imply less long-term design flexibility than can be achieved with inkjets.
- Printers generally need support from a computer’s operating system. DOS has no control over printers, the work is all done by individual programs. Microsoft Windows 3.1 has a rather inflexible print manager–Windows 95 is better. Windows NT 4.0 printing works well.
- The environmental impact of computer printing can be substantial - generally printers with lower running costs probably have a lower environmental impact.
- Substituting Electronic Data Interchange, bulletin boards, Internet or publishing on CD-ROM.
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Digital storage and distribution costs are very low. Once the equipment is in place the cost of text and simple pictures is close to zero; music and movies cost a bit more.
Time costs are low as well. Search engines and online references typically eturn some relevant information in under a second - quite possibly faster than human memory. Good information on an obscure or hard to describe issue may minutes - where library research used to take days.
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There are some incidental effects: screen layout tends to be ragged where paper often has justified right margins. Paper layout tends to be edited
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Throughout history to about 30 years ago there was no real contest about how to hold information - it had to be on paper. The pharoes, mayan priests, Chinese emperors and the churches of Europe had afforded the labour to chisel, mould or carve lasting records but the amount that can be transmitted in this way is small. Papyrus
Wisdom and knowledge may arguably be matters of quality not quantity.
The Quoran, Bible or the complete works of Shakespeare all fit into 5 megabytes
The build-up of scientific knowledge seems to have started with readily available paper and printing in the fifteenth century.
Paper combines several roles that are distinct in a computer. Paper is a way of holding, finding and viewing information.
Computer screens just show information, they don't normally hold it. A computer near the screen creates what is shown. One of the reasons paper remains important is that screens aren't very good:- they are expensive, they don't show enough information, and finding information using a screen, keyboard and mouse is too clumsy.
Inside the computer the flash-memory or disk that does hold information represents it as a bit pattern. The bit pattern is so small it could only be seen by an electron microscope. The patterns inside memories are smaller than the wavelength of light and getting smaller with each successive generation of equipment. The progress will continue for another ten or fifteen years. The patterns on a hard-disk are so small that a 120 gigabyte disk holding a trillion bits
Finding information using a computer is very different to finding it on paper. If you recently used a book then it probably nearby open at the last page. If you recently read a file then it might be on the taskbar of your screen. A book has the clear advantage of lots of display area quickly accessed by pagenumber, coloured paper edges or familiarity. A computer screen has the advantage of generally being connected to large disk stores and probably the Internet.
Early computers were calculators turning streams of information into neat print-out on the characteristic green-lined printout paper. Gradually it occurred to people that it might be cheaper to hold megabytes of information on tape than to keep the paper. Now there doesn't seem to be much contest - it's generally better to store things on disk.
The rise of the disk drive from £10,000 maintenance nightmare holding payroll records to cheap, quiet, reliable device mainly holding music, pictures and movies (but also payrol) is not much commented on. People tend to reserve their superlatives for Intels latest processors or Microsoft's latest operating system. It's actually the rise of the disk-drive that makes movies on demand possible - and raises the possibility that people could do without paper.
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Just how much information exists?
Information is a nebulous idea but just as there are patterns to clouds there are trends to information.
We are told that God is interested in the fall of the smallest sparrow; bird flu suggests reasons why people might pay interest too. At the moment we are just getting out first glimpses into the complex ecosystems in tropical forest canopies and ocean floor vents. And of course we still haven't much idea what sub atomic particles are up to - or indeed where 90% of the mass and energy in the universe actually are. Information on the scale of the universe might not be very helpful anyway, because almost by definition there can be nowhere to put it - except another universe.
Information on the universal scale is too abstract to be of much interest. Its like having pictures of the forest when there is no-one to see it -
Useful information is the sort of thing humans can see, hear and ecord. ///
Text is a reasonable way to sum things up.
volume is not necessarily a measure of information.
E=MC2 is rather packed with information.
"Once upon a time" is a meaningless phrase, packed with portent.
People say that a picture is worth a thousand words - and archetypal images from Da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Michaelangelo's Cistine Chapel through to the Atom bomb cloud or the NASA blue pearl are often described as iconic.
Picture information usually occupies much more computer space than a thousand words. A thousand words of UTF-8 code is about 6 kilobytes of code. Most JPEG pictures tend to be 30 kilobytes or more. Most pictures are not iconic, at best they are decorative and at worst they are downright misleading.
www.uplink.freeuk.com/data.html
Library of Congress is one of the largest in the world, holding around 128 million items including
28 million catalogued books and other print materials in 470 languages
more than 50 million manuscripts
the largest rare book colletion in North America
the worlds largest collection of legal materials, films, maps, sheet music and sound recordings.
The library serves as a legal repository to guarantee copyright protection. Authors seeking copyright registration must submit two copies of their works. Largely because of this nearly 22,000 new items arrive every day. The library does not retain all these works in it's permanent collection but does add an average of 10,000 items per day - 3.6 million per year.
Estimating the size of the library if it were digitised is a bit of a sport. The size is commonly said to be 17 to 20 terabytes - which might be about right for 30 million books. The library actually has several tens of terabytes online from its other collections. Estimates for converting paper to text tend to be on the low side- not taking illustrations and page markup into account.
The British Library has a similar task.
The British Library holds something above 150 million items and adds about 3 million per year.
The British Library's Content Strategy document (early 2006) gives the following statistics about its holdings
The equivalent of about 610 linear kilometers of collection items.
13.3 million books (in every written language)
858,656 serial titles.
55.8 million patent specifications.
56,248 newspaper titles.
314,063 manuscripts (single and volumes).
1.5 million sound discs and tapes.
1.6 million music scores.
There is a legal requirement on publishers of books and periodicals in the UK to deposit a copy in the British Library, the National Libaries of Scotland and Wales, Oxford, Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin. (There are reciprocal agreements for Irish books). An advantage to authors and publishers is the guarantee of copyright protection and since the British Library does retain all the legal deposits there is a good chance that the work will survive. The publishing industry in the UK has an output of over 100,000 books per year (recently rising to 120,000). To cope with this the library is said to be adding something of the order 11 miles of shelves per year.
Although the library has large, modern reading ooms it interprets its role as being more than just a library of last esort, so the rooms are often crowded. To cope with this the library is actively propmoting the idea of making material available in electronic form.
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