Great comments, thank you. 🙂 And I like novellas. 😉

I agree, people still need paper, or something that is as portable and user-friendly as paper – which means paper (there’s no way technology is going to catch up on that one any time soon, barring some major technology innovations).

And there’s still a very real problem with digital displays being less easy on the eyes, and…being too *different*. For example, a problem is the way we read a page: we usually need the whole page open in front of us, our gaze jumping around – whereas screens scroll downwards, and so it gets in the way of our time-tested ways of thinking when we have to scroll down a page. It’s clumsy, non-intuitive stuff for our brains. So we prefer offline reading.

(Yet there’s the problem with new products: they need people to invest in them with their cash and word-of-mouth. Without that period of putting up with the shortcomings, paper-replacing technology couldn’t get off the ground commercially).

Until these are truly solved, yep, e-reading is a poor second to paper. But as you note, the currently budding generations are embracing new technology better, and they’re more eco-aware about it (we’ve had plenty of students asking about how sustainable our paper sources are). I just wish that in my current workplace, they were more vocal…

Blackboard sounds a great application. We had something similar although much less advanced when I was at Uni a few years back – lecture notes and required reading lists were available on a special departmental Intranet. But we never had scanned reading in there, which would have been great (and much less frustrating in tracking down the right books at the library).

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I am so glad I found you site. What an inspiration.

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However, even just committing to being a less paper environment makes a huge difference in the amount of needless paper we don’t use, and also has set everyone up to recycle (each of us has a paper recycle box next to our desks, which is picked up once a week by maintenance for shredding and recycling). I think that universities need to start making similar commitments – they are filled with old school professors and deans who don’t like much change. However, I think that their clients (the students) are young enough to want to enforce such a change, which would better the environment, and decrease the amount of stuff they have to store and cart around.

For your company, you could think to use your copiers as scanners instead, and also offer other services that would help in a less paper environment for the university, such as computers with the current versions of Adobe which allow people to use documents (sort of) like paper. Both could be rented out for a fee. This would help keep your job!

However, I do think the printing business is a dying breed – and though it’s really not because of the environment, but actually because of technology – universities are probably some of the few clients left who actually really use lots of these services.

Sorry, I think I just wrote a short novella.