Category: Going Paperless

Rethinking Going Paperless

By James Wallace Harris, Friday, June 12, 2015

Back in 2008 I started a series of essays about Going Paperless. I cancelled the paper, let all my magazine subscriptions run out, worked hard to convince junk mail senders to stop sending me crap, got off mailing lists, and did whatever I could to stop the flow of paper into my house. I greatly reduced my usage. It made me happy. My paper recycle box usually takes weeks to fill.

Then about a year ago, I got a couple magazine offers so cheap I couldn’t resist. Then I got more. Who wouldn’t want The New Yorker for $25 for 52 issues? After years of reading free on the web, I kind of missed the magazine experience. Now I’ve got piled of unread magazines sitting around again. I hate that. I hate to throw them out unread. I feel an obligation now to save those magazines and read them so the sacrifice of all those trees won’t have been in vain.

goingGreen

Having this clutter again annoys me. I do love reading magazines, but I hate their clutter. I won’t renew any of my paper subscriptions or make new ones. I actually do 95% of my periodical reading off the Internet, or from Next Issue, a digital subscription library to 140 magazines for $15 a month. I was almost paper free and I had a relapse. Sorry about that.

Annoyingly, our local paper has decided to give everyone weekly special issue. I tear out the crossword puzzle and put it in the recycle box. What a waste. I feel sorry for newspapers, but how many of their pages are actually read?

In the seven years since I started this project, my bank, credit card, retirement account, health insurance, car insurance, utility all wanted me to go paperless too, and I have. But it feels strange not having any paper proof of my savings and debt. I’m having to invent new routines to handle living in a digital world.

I still have plenty of paper books, but I don’t really like buying them anymore. I buy printed books when they are cheaper than Kindle books. For example, a recent book club read was $9.70 Kindle and $4.00 for a used printed copy. I went the cheap route. I’ll read the paper copy and then give it to the library. However, if I had bought the Kindle version, I’d have it for keeps.  I would have saved some trees and the fuel it took to ship it to me. I would have opted for the ebook if it had been $5.99 or lower. I think it odd that publishers price their ebooks so close to printed editions. Why aren’t electrons cheaper than ink and paper?

For the last two decades we’ve been going through a digital revolution, and it’s affecting more than just paper. I’m phasing out CDs, LPs, DVDs, cassettes and even hard drives. I recently switched to a SSD drive (solid-state drive). When I cleaned out my closet I found six internal SATA drives and one external USB drive, all 500GB to 2TB. My new SSD is only 250GB, and so far I’ve only used about 70GB. Because of cloud drives and digital content providers like Audible, Spotify, Next Issue, Amazon, Scribd, etc., many books, songs, television shows and movies I used to horde on mechanical drives now reside in electronic libraries.

I wonder if by 2020 if I will own any content on physical media? Not only will I have gone paperless, but I will have gone disc-less too. Did anyone imagine how the smartphone would bring about a paperless society? Now that Apple is joining the Spotify revolution, how many people will keep their old CDs, or even their iTunes songs. When I set up this new computer I intentionally didn’t install iTunes, or copy my 25,000 MP3 files to my Music folder.

I’m currently reading Hellstrom’s Hive by Frank Herbert, a novel from the early seventies about a secret branch of humanity that models their society on insect societies. Is the Internet creating a hive mind? Now that we store our libraries of knowledge and art online to share, doesn’t that radically change how we live?

Where does paper still get used? Packaging. Way too much of that. And what about school work. Do kids still turn in all their work on paper? Receipts are a big source of paper for my recycle box. And I still get too much junk mail – not anything like before, but still a good bit. For some reason every charity I contribute to feel the need to send me a regular magazine. I need to write them about that.

Of course, in the future when anthropologists unearth our civilization, they will only find dead smartphones and tablets. I wonder what they will make of that?

JWH

Next Issue: Can Magazines on Tablet Computers Replace Printed Magazines?

Years ago I gave up subscribing and buying paper magazines in hopes of going paperless.  Oh, I’d break the rules and buy a magazine now and then.  Then recently a guy a work started giving me his magazines after he read them with recommendations of articles to read.  I started discovering that some articles found in magazines are vastly superior to most of the free articles I was finding on the web.  I guess it’s a case of getting what you pay for.  I also discovered for some subjects its much more fun to browse a magazine than the web.

So I started back on a couple of paper magazine and quickly discovered I really don’t like them piling up.  Once you go paperless, it’s hard to go back to paper.  Then I discovered Next Issue.  For $15 a month I got digital access to a library of magazines.  (There’s also a $9.99 version with fewer magazine.)  I quickly rediscovered just how much I love magazines.  The only trouble is they don’t look very good on my iPad 2.

next-issue-sample

That’s not completely true.  Some look much better than others.  For the most part the magazines look like their paper versions – I see all the editorial content and the ads.  Some even have extras, like animations, film clips, and multiple view of photos, so in a sense they are super-magazines.  And some magazines actually reformat their content slightly to take advantage of tablets.  So when you get to an article you page down to read it, rather than page right, for a few pages, and then skipping to page 79 to finish the thing.  The magazines that use this feature tend to format their content in a larger font that’s easy to read without magnification – and that looks best on older tablets like the iPad 2.  Other magazines just give you two views of a static page, one that fits the screen on the tablet, and another brought up by double tapping that is greatly magnified that you slide around with your finger to read.

I’ve been reading for weeks with my old iPad 2, and getting into this new method of magazine reading, all the while thinking about how it could be better.  Mostly I thought about having to buy an iPad Air.

I then borrowed my wife’s Kindle Fire HD with a 7” screen and spent an evening reading my favorite magazines.  The Kindle HD has much better resolution than the iPad 2, a pre-retina display model.  Switching between the two  devices, taught me something about reading magazines on  a tablet, and made me realize that Apple no longer has a lock on tablet computers.  Here’s what I learned:

  1. Resolution matters – the more the better.  Sometimes it’s nicer to read small fonts than to tap and magnify
  2. 7” tablets are much easier to hold and read for longer periods of time
  3. 10” tablets make the photos pop out more, so it’s more fun to look at pictures with a larger screen
  4. If the magazine formats for the tablet, it’s much easier to read on a 7” screen
  5. If the magazine doesn’t format for the tablet, it’s much easier to read on a 10” screen
  6. An aspect ratio of 4:3 is probably better for magazines than 16:10, but not always
  7. I have to use a reading stand with the larger tablet for long periods of reading
  8. A 7” screen is more conducive of carrying around
  9. I’d love to be able to print a whole article, or clip it to Evernote.  The iOS version of Next Issue will let me AirPrint a page at a time.
  10. If I could clip an article to Evernote (or .pdf) I could print it from Evernote
  11. Tablets offer a way for magazines to offer more creative layouts, and even multimedia

Next Issue is far from perfect, but I still feel like I’m getting my money’s worth.  I would be happier if I could find just the right tablet, if I could save articles, and if I could get a few more magazines.  Of course this is dealing with two different issues.  One, can I enjoy reading a magazine exclusively on a tablet and give up print copies?  And two, does Next Issue offer everything I want to read?

Next Issue is a disruptive technology in the same way Netflix was a game changer.  I essentially stopped buying videos after I adapted to Netflix.  Will I give up buying magazines too?  Next Issue has a nice selection of over 125 magazines, but it doesn’t have The Atlantic, Scientific American, Discover, Sky and Telescope, Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The New York Review of Books, Linux Journal, and others that I like.

next-issue-sample2

But like I said, that’s two issues when regarding whether can I give up paper magazines for reading magazines on a tablet.  If I had a Kindle Fire HDX, either 7” or 8.9” screen, or an Apple iPad Air or Mini with Retina Display, or a Nexus 7 or 10, or Samsung Note 10.1 2014, I might be able to conclusively answer the first part of the question.  They have the dots per inch resolution that will make tablets sharp enough to read small print.  And they might even make photography stand out more.  However, paper still wins on some factors.

If I can’t clip to Evernote or .pdf, printed magazines win on the “tearing an article out to save” factor.  Also, for “making a photocopy” factor.  They also win on “lending/giving to a friend” factor.  But tablets win on “these magazines are driving me crazy piling up around the house” factor.  Tablets also win on the “where the hell did I put that magazine” factor.  They also win on the “I wish I had that magazine with me” factor because Next issue works from the smartphone and iPod touch.

It’s not hard to see the writing on the wall.  Paper and printing will eventually go away.  Whether magazine library subscriptions like Next Issue will become standard is still to be decided.  Netflix hasn’t killed the DVD buying business, but it’s changed it.  Netflix did kill off the local video store, and I wonder if tablets will do that to newsstands?

JWH – 1/5/14

Going Paperless with Dropbox

Life is full of paperwork, both printed and digital.  Our lives generate thousands of documents that chronicles our existence.  When my mother died several years ago I had to go through boxes and boxes that were a paper trail of her life.  It took months to close out her affairs to the point where I could destroy the paperwork.  In the end I had one small folder of documents and many boxes of photographs.

When I die I hope to leave my wife a well organized Dropbox folder that is a digital snapshot of my life.  I want to die paperless.  I’ve been working on going paperless since 2008.

People have been talking about our society giving up paper for decades but it’s never been practical.  We’re getting close.  By 2025, we’ll essentially be a paperless society I hope.  I doubt the printed document will go away entirely, who would want a digital diploma or marriage certificate?

We still need to save all those digital documents somewhere, and I think Dropbox, or its kin, will be the answer.  Years ago I had hoped regulated data banks would have appeared for us to use, but I guess that was wishful thinking on my part.

What’s needed is transition technology.  Businesses have been using optical imaging systems to go paperless since the 1980s.  Home users have had scanners for almost as long, but developing a complete home system for storing documents safely has not been practical until cloud storage became cheap, and it’s still not as safe as the data banks I imagined.  Nobody is regulating data storage.

Three technologies have emerged that move us closer to the goal of being a paperless society.

  • Dropbox
  • Evernote
  • Scanners with PDF scanning

dropbox

Dropbox, and it’s competitors Google Drive, Amazon Cloud Drive, SkyDrive, Box.net, etc., offers us reasonably safe places to put our digital files.  Scanning files to a laptop that could be stolen, burned up in a fire, or eaten by viruses wasn’t a good solution.  Leaving your important paper files at home in a cheap filing cabinet wasn’t really that safe either.  If you treasure your family photos, they’re one disaster away from oblivion if you only have a single copy – paper or digital.  Digitizing important files and keeping them in multiple locations is the prudent way to go.

I’ve been using Dropbox for awhile and it’s taken time to appreciate what Dropbox can do for me.  It’s also taken time to learn how to create a folder organization structure to use with Dropbox.  Although my system is not perfected,  I feel I’m finally on to something.  It takes time to learn all the tricks, like naming documents by date order (i.e. 2009-05-17-connell-letter.pdf) or configuring the default scan to folder.  I like scanning to a \scan folder on my c: drive so I can easily drag and file to another window that contains my Dropbox folders.  Right now I have a flatbed scanner but I’m looking at a Fujitsu S1300i ScanSnap that has simple document feeder that can scan both sides of a document and works directly with Dropbox and Evernote.

The idea is to store all my paperwork and photos digitally in an electronic folder system that makes finding stuff easy, and it’s protected by backing up to multiple sites.

What really made things come together was when my wife got out our old flatbed scanner to scan her family photos for Christmas presents and I noticed the PDF Scan feature.  I tend to let papers and mail pile up on my desk until the top gets covered in a foot paper.  Every year I swear I’ll never let this happen again, but I do.  This year I discovered how easy it is to scan documents I want to save and file them in Dropbox.

At first I didn’t trust Dropbox for long term storage.  I just used it for temporary storage, like if I had a document at work that I wanted to work on at home.  Then I realized how Dropbox functioned.  I had assumed the files were only stored on a remote server.  That’s not how it works.  Your files are replicated from your Dropbox folder on your local machine and the working copy remains on your computer.  A copy is stored at the Dropbox site.  This means Dropbox acts like a backup system.  Not only that, if you have a second computer, the files are replicated to that computer too.  My Dropbox files are replicated to five computers.  I can also call up those files on my iPad and iPod touch.  That’s two PCs at home, and on a PC, Mac and Linux machines at work.

Counting Dropbox’s storage, that means my files are stored on six machines in three locations.  That’s pretty safe I think.  I assume Dropbox backs up my files too because they offer 30 days of free undeletes and for $39 a year, unlimited undeletes.  And Dropbox encrypts files and uses https to transfer files.  I could also encrypt those files again with something like TrueCrypt, if I was worried about Dropbox poking into my business, which I’m not at the moment.

Right now I have 14gb of unpaid space on Dropbox and I’m using 6gb.  That’s not enough for my MP3 songs and audiobooks, but it is for all my writing, photographs and scanned paperwork.  I do have my music library backed up on Amazon and Google Music cloud drives, so I’m well covered for MP3 files.  I also have 20gb of space at Amazon for non MP3 files but it’s not as flexible and convenient to use as Dropbox.  And I have 25gb on SkyDrive.  Eventually, as an extra backup protection I might replicate my Dropbox folder to one of my other cloud drive folders.

The key to making this work is the folder filing system I’m creating.  So far these are my top level folders:

dropbox-files

My original idea was to create top level folders based on file format types, but I wanted easier access for my most used folders, so I broke Fiction and Nonfiction out of Word Documents.

Under Biographical I have folders for Medical History, Timeline and Notes.   I was keeping text files of to do lists, phone lists, email lists, book lists, etc. in a folder called Notes but I moved it under Biographical.  Do I want to think, “Oh it’s a text file, so look under Notes,” or do I want to think, “Where’s that timeline of schools I went to,” and think Biographical?  I decided to file by meaning rather than file format.

I also have Photos and Wallpaper which both store .jpg files, and I might combine them, but it’s nice to separate family photos from my archive of desktop pictures, screensaver art and art history galleries.

Most everything I save for reference gets scanned and made into a PDF, which has a more elaborate folder structure.  I haven’t scanned my entire filing cabinet yet, and probably won’t, at least not any time soon.  However, I have scanned current paper work and certain old folders, and it wasn’t that much work.  I wish I had a sheet feeder system like our optical imaging systems at work, but I don’t know if they’re worth the buying right now.   I listen to audiobooks as I scan, killing two birds with one stone.

I had a folder of old letters, some 50+ years old, that existed before email, that I scanned and put into Dropbox.   I haven’t decided yet about banking, tax and other business documents.  I worry about privacy and whether or not my digital copy is valid in a legal dispute.  Some paper documents I might save for sentimental reasons, like old report cards or letters from my grandmother, but I do want them digitized.

I’ve discovered that many paper manuals I’ve been saving for my TV, receiver, CD player, cameras, etc. are online as PDFs.   So I saved those PDFs to my Dropbox and threw away my paper copies.  I also found articles I have clipped are often still online, so I found and saved those to Evernote, and threw away my paper copies.  Others I scanned and saved to Dropbox, although Evernote also will store PDF.  In fact, some of the documents I’m storing in Dropbox might be better suited for Evernote, which indexes files for quick retrieval.

For 2013 I need to study the pros and cons of Evernote versus Dropbox.  Right now if I wrote it, it goes in Dropbox, if someone else wrote it, it goes in Evernote.  Except for ebooks.  Normally Amazon handles all my ebooks, but occasionally I get ebooks from places other than Amazon, and I have to maintain the original.  Although I’m thinking about converting .epub books to .mobi with Calibre and sending them to my Kindle.   So that folder might disappear.

One thing I’ve learned is to depend on companies that maintain my digital purchases like Amazon for music and Audible for audiobooks.

Right now I’m using Dropbox as my primary storage for photographs but that could change if I find a photo site that does more.  But Dropbox is so universal that I find it hard to believe other sites could compete.  And if I combine Pixlr.com with Dropbox I can do snappy photo editing on the fly.

Back in 2008 I started down my road of Going Paperless by cancelling my magazines and newspapers.  This has been a slow process.  My mailbox probably gets 90% less paper each week.  I still have to write companies telling them not to send catalogs.  And I still get mail for people long dead.  Most of the other stuff is official documents I feel I must save.  I’m going to look into seeing about getting my health insurance, 401K, credit card and banking statements online, but I want to research the legal safety issues about that first.

Cleaning Out Computer Files

Once I started filing scanned documents into Dropbox I realized I could clean up my computer drives by copying files to Dropbox too.  I have several computers and many external drives that have filled up with up with decades of digital crap, and backups of crap, and backups of backups.  I’ve been going through them copying important files I want to save to Dropbox and then deleting the others.  I’ve found unique photographs I want to keep hidden on different drives, so this process has helped consolidate my picture library.

I’m still worry about the ultimate safety of Dropbox.  Because it replicates copies to all my computers it makes me feel fairly safer overall.  I’m off for the holidays, so I remotely connected to my computer at work and verified that all the files I’m been saving to Dropbox were replicated to my work computer, and they are.  My fear now is Dropbox will go crazy and delete all my files off all my computers.  If you delete a file from Dropbox it’s eventually deleted from all your computers.  If Dropbox went berserk I could unplug the Ethernet cable before I turned on one of my computers and rescue those files.  I could use a replicating program and copy my Dropbox files to my Amazon Cloud Drive or Microsoft SkyDrive, but I’d really like to trust Dropbox.  Once I clean out all my computer files, scan my paper files and create the perfect folder filing system, I don’t want it to get out of sync again.

I also made Dropbox my default folder in Windows.  Thus I won’t be tempted by having a real folder of files and a Dropbox folder of files to maintain.  It’s all one now.

Future Dropbox Projects

Susan’s family history photo project was a big hit at our Christmas Eve party.  She assembled a three generation history of her family starting with her mother and father that was told in 386 photographs.  I’m encouraging her to move it to Dropbox or another cloud site to expand on it.  I also want to create photo histories for my mother and father’s families, and get my cousins to add their photos to mine to build a super photo history.  When my mother died several years ago I inherited all her family photos, and my dad’s family photos.  I’ve been meaning for years to make copies for my cousins.  Now I’m thinking Dropbox will solve that problem.

The Future of Dropbox

I’m not sure Dropbox is the ultimate digital bank vault for my files, but it’s what I’m using at the moment.  I might get burned.  Dropbox could go out of business.  Right now I have enough free space that I don’t need to pay.  What it’s that’s true with everyone?  How can Dropbox make money.  Right now the cheapest plan is $99 for 100gb.  I wish they had a $49 plan for 50gb, that would make a better introductory price.

Or better yet, I wished Dropbox charged a straight $1 per gigabyte per year and we could buy as few or many as we wanted.

You can get free space on Dropbox.  You start with 2 gigabytes by joining but you earn more by getting others to join, and you get bonus space if you join from a referral.  If you don’t have Dropbox use this link and both of us will get 500 megabytes of additional free space.  That means you start with 2.5 gigabytes by using my referral.

As I switch to reading on the Kindle and iPad, I tend to think my book collection will shrink.  Dropbox works wonderful from tablets.  I tend to think sometime in the near future all my books, magazines, photographs, personal documents, videos, music albums, etc. will be on my tablet computer, and my home office will have just furniture and a computer with a big screen and great sound system.

Other Dropbox Tips

JWH – 12/26/12

Web Sites I Want – Best Essays from Printed Magazines

Even with the social bookmarking sites, reading from the internet is like drinking from a fire hose.  What I’d like to see is highly selective bookmarking site, and in particular, the one I’d love to have most would be Best Essays From Printed Magazines.  The top writing on the net is usually reprinted from the major print magazines, but those essays are overshadowed by the gigantic volume of web journalism.  Hey, I’m a blogger and love getting readers, and I love reading blogs, but the heaviest of the heavy duty essays are still from print magazines.  The cutthroat survival of the fittest in the print magazine industry by its very nature acquires the best writing.

That’s why I’d like a site that helps me find the best essays over 1,000 words.  Adding the length requirement is important because too many magazines have gone to filling up their pages with short web level writing.  Social bookmarking sites like delicious and StumbleUpon are great for snacking on popcorn and candy level reads, but not so yummy if you’re looking for literary steak.  Yes, they will link to long quality essays from printed magazines, but you have to wade through zillions of peanut size stories of questionable value, more akin to Television’s funniest videos in informational nutrition.

No, I want a site that’s very specific and limited.  I’d like an editorial board that selects the Top 100 magazines that publishes their content on the web, and offers a system that lets users bookmark and vote on the best essays they are reading.  Hell, I’d even pay to subscribe to such a site if they got permission to reprint articles that don’t get reprinted on the web.

The web has gotten too big and mangy, so when I want to know something I go to a specific site, mainly Wikipedia.  I’ve given up subscribing to magazines, mainly because I’m against paper for environmental reasons, but also because when I was subscribing to dozens of magazines, all too often I’d only find a good article here and there.  Most of the content was filler, like the web.  I guess I’ve gotten spoiled by the iTunes model – who wants to buy an album when it’s the hit song you want.  This is why I prefer Netflix to cable TV.  We need more ways to cut out the noise.

Here’s are examples of the kind of long essays I’d like to read:

I guess what I really want is a web version of the Best American Series to be published monthly, instead of the yearly printed volumes they have now.  And if they wanted to make extra money, reprint the monthly web site editions as ebooks for $9.99 for Kindles, Nooks, iPads, etc.

JWH – 5/12/10

The Weight of Paper

Nanny, my grandmother on my mother’s side, was born in 1881 and grew up before the automobile, airplane, radio and silent film.  She watched all the technology emerged that in my boyhood I took for granted, like electricity, the telephone, refrigerators, cloth washers and dryers, air conditioners, etc.  She died a couple years after Neil and Buzz landed on the Moon. 

My mother was born in 1916 and grew up with the radio, at a time when movies morphed from silent pictures into talkies, watched the television age emerge, drove across the country before the interstate highway system was built, and lived long enough to see computers become personal, phones stored in pockets and the world wired for computer networks, although she refused to own a cell phone or computer. 

I was born in 1951, and I’m not sure if I’ve seen as much dramatic cultural change as those two women, but I grew up in front of a TV, watching the advent of the space age, the computer age and the digital age, and if I live long enough I might see far more dramatic transformations.  They both lived to 91, and if I could live as long, I will see the world change as much as they did from 1881 and 1916 until 1951.

Computers are changing the way we all live, but have they changed us as much as the automobile, airplane, radio, movie and television?  Current digital technology often makes me dislike the way I used to do things, even though I feel strong nostalgia for how things were. Take reading for instance, all aspects of my reading habits have changed in my lifetime.  I now listen to books on an iPod, or read them printed on small digital screens like in Star Trek.  For a more specific example, my wife is nagging me about my magazine collection, housed in two six foot high bookcases. 

I love magazines, and spent six years working in a Periodicals department at a university library.  My home library contains hundreds of issues from dozens of titles.  Even Susan asks, “Can’t you get them on online?”  I stopped reading newspapers years ago, and I might stop reading magazines soon.  I prefer audio books now, even though I spent my whole life as a bookworm, and 99% of the words I read with my eyes each day come through my computer screen.  I even listen to magazines, like The New Yorker, and prefer it to reading.

The weight of a single sheet of paper is almost unnoticeable, but the weight of twelve shelves of magazines is quite heavy.  Since we had new flooring put in this month, I had to move four bookcases of books, and two bookcases of magazines and the weight of that paper was almost backbreaking.  How many trees went into making all that paper?  What was the impact on the environment?

Awhile back, to do my bit to fight global warming, I started going paperless, and cut my magazines subscriptions from over 20 to just 2 (Sky and Telescope and Rolling Stone – what an odd couple, huh?).  But I kept all my old issues hoping to get the maximum reading value someday, and maybe even clip the best articles to scan into my computer.  I’m at point in time when I’m shifting away from one kind of living, with paper, and moving into another way of life, without paper. 

I still buy an occasional mag at the bookstore, but even that makes me feel guilty, because that means my pile of unfinished magazines keeps growing, and more trees were cut down.  I tend to flip through a magazine and read the shorter pieces and tell myself that I’ve just got to find time for those great longer pieces someday, but I seldom do.  The weight of paper can also be measured in time, and I have a huge amount of time theoretically reserved for that reading.  Throwing all those magazines out will reduce the weight of possessions and free up a lot of imagined obligated hours, probably in the thousands.

I have nice long runs of Sky and Telescope, Astronomy Magazine, New Scientist, Scientific American, National Geographic, Smithsonian, Popular Photography and many others.  I like to think of them as my reference library, but honestly, I rarely refer to them.  Reading online has become my habitual way of info-gathering.  And since I often read online articles about the dwindling subscriber base to newspapers and periodicals, I’m guessing there are many people like me.  If only they made a Kindle-like reading device with a large full-colored screen, I’d probably do 100% my eye reading from online sources.

But I must also emphasize the shift from eye reading to ear reading has been very important to me.  That’s another paradigm shift, and I think it scares people in the literacy profession.

Throwing away my magazine collection would be like throwing away the past.  According to Wikipedia, general interest magazines started in 1731 with The Gentleman’s Magazine, so will we see the era of the printed magazine end before it’s 300th anniversary?  When I was born the pulp magazine format was dying and the science fiction and fantasy digest magazine was beginning.  Today those digests are disappearing and a new crop of online SF/F magazines are emerging.  Read Jason Sanford’s recent survey of these new short story venues for emerging writers of fantastic fiction.  Will getting published be as exciting?  It will certainly be easier to send copies to your friends.

Today I read “Ten things mobiles have made, or will make, obsolete.”  Among the ten items was paper, (also included were pay phones, landline home phones, MP3 players, netbooks, small digital cameras, handheld game consoles, wristwatches and alarm clocks).  It’s quite easy to read on an iPhone, whether it’s a book, short story, magazine article or news item.

There is also talk that the United States Postal Service is failing.  I can understand why, because only 1 piece of mail in 15 is something I actual need, and even that piece could be eliminated by electronic billing.  Nearly everything I get in my mailbox goes right into the recycling bin.  This is especially a shame for all those fancy full-color catalogs, resources terribly wasted because I don’t even flip through their pages.

The era of paper might be nearing its end.  The more effort I put into recycling the more I realize that most paper trees die in vain, and their lives would be better spent absorbing carbon dioxide.  I will agonize over all the people in paper related industries who will lose their jobs, but the history of the world is change, and nothing stays the same.

If I lived until 2042, to become 91 like my mother and grandmother, I might see the end of newspapers, magazines and books.  I’ll probably see the passing of paper photographs, 8-16-35-70mm film formats, LPs, CDs, DVDs, BDs and any other form of audio-visual physical storage.  Stranger still, I might see the end of libraries and bookstores.  Everything will be digital, and the net will be a universal library.  Newsstands are already disappearing fast.  Bookstore business is still growing, but if the Kindle and its kin catch on, that will change too.  And libraries aren’t what they used to be.

The age of wasting natural resources should end in our lifetimes, either from changing our lifestyles to avoid the worst of global warming, or by adapting to the new environments that global warming brings into existence.  It is impossible to know the future.  It is impossible to know what black swan changes are in store for us.  The folks of 1881 could not picture 1916 much less 1951 and 2009 is beyond anything anyone could imagine from the 19th century, so I can’t really predict 2019 or 2042.

However, when was the last time you put a coin in a pay phone or a letter in a letter box?  How many other things have you stopped doing in recent years that you haven’t even notice you stopped doing?  It’s easy to be amazed by new inventions, but will we even notice when the weight of all that paper is gone?

JWH – 11/24/9