Are you still printing that paper in this digital age?

There are people who simply can’t live without printing that paper out to keep, to read the words and edit the copy (or just to waste the paper.) before they edit it inside the computer again.  It has been quite a while since 1998 when I last printed out that paper, just to look at it.  Until I have to do that recently, it can be quite addictive sometimes to print and read myself too!

Reading the words and editing the copy from the computer is actually not very difficult.  In fact, it is quite wasting paper for that purpose.

I read Chris Brogan’s post about fixing the paper hole!  It is so funny!  As part of an online marketing agency, he finds it so troublesome to print, sign and fax as requested by the other party.  It surely happens to me when I asked for quotations and I have to print it out to sign to accept the quotations.

In Singapore, email is becoming very crucial in every company’s daily life.  It becomes an official document instantly.  It saves a lot of paper actually.  But they still don’t adapt to use Wiki much because of the “technology refusal” that they have in them.  They simply refuse to use technology even though they are using emails.  It can be really messy when we are in a discussion about a topic which is requires a lot of replies.  You’ll find this sentence very familiar “Please see my comments in red”.

As Internet marketers, every one of us should play a role of printing as little amount of paper as possible and focus on using our computer for all our transaction needs.  I believe legal contracts can also be solved one day to be paperless!

Ebooks are here.  But they are probably very hard to replace our physical books.  Ebooks are surely convenient and are instant gratification when we do a purchase online.  Reading from ebooks is still at its infant stage and the sales of brick-n-mortar bookstores are still roaring high!  We do have initiatives from companies building gadgets to allow us to read ebooks easily such as Epson E-Book Reader,  Amazon Kindle, Sony E-Book Reader, and even our mobile phones are able to read ebooks too.

I hope to have only my laptop and my mobile phone by my side as my portable office wherever I go.  No more papers please…