The Future of Documents

Maybe not. In this article, “E-Texts Receive Mixed Reviews From Students“, the Wall Street Journal describes a few experiments with e-books as student textbooks.

Some found the affordances of electronic documents (e.g. keyword searching) a major improvement over hardcopy textbooks. Weight, up-to-date versions of documents, and (at least in theory) lower price were also some of the qualities that were invoked.

However, dozens of the students dropped out of the e-Textbook programs, complaining the devices were awkward and inconvenient, and sometimes too fragile. They are “great if you’re using them on a beach or on an airplane, but not fully functional for a learning environment”, according to some. Even worse, the actual price (including the high entrypoint for the hardware, but also the actual price per book – which ends up often close to the hardcopy version) was also a major turndown.

A study from the Student Public Interest Research Group concluded that 75% of students would still prefer print to digital texts…

However, these are just first generations of textbooks. Future generations, with real annotation capabilities, no “flashing” of displays when refreshing, and closer to real paper physical format, should gain more traction from students… But this will take time.

Interesting article on how Universities are struggling with cost control, especially related to energy drains from their data centers and computing equipments.

Colleges and universities have been slow in adopting energy-saving techniques, due to their decentralization, and lack of cohesive strategies. A survey found out that “higher-education institutions are less likely than businesses, the K-12 sector, and federal government, to adopt a formal policy to encourage energy efficient buying decisions”. Surprisingly enough, “researchers often resist plans for centralization because they want their servers just down the hall” – although this is usually a population which is quite sensitive to environmental concerns.

But energy drain from computing equipment is just part of the story – most of these studies do not take the consumption of printing equipments. In order to get greener while cutting costs, universities should also rationalize their print fleet and document-related costs. Sure, printers represent a small amount of the overall energy consumption, but it’s always worth checking out what can is consumed and can be saved through tools like the Carbon Footprint Calculator.  And, just like the University of Calgary, they should start on a journey to reduce paper consumption. That would help them realize the Less Paper Office vision and save a huge stack of paper (one mile in their case) which amounts to many trees, but even more dollars.

How should universities go about greening up their document processes as well? The methodology detailed in the article applies here as well: start with an Audit of your current spendings in document costs, establish a task force, then consolidate and outsource or consolidate their document processes and equipments.

Does Generation Y (especially college students) want to get rid of paper altogether, as the Economist article(and many other studies) suggest? Maybe not, after all.

This article on Wired Campus actually suggests the contrary, actually: “The survey showed that students feel strongly about the printed word. About 75 percent of those surveyed said they prefer a printed textbook over an electronic one. And 60 percent said that even if a free digital copy were available, they would still pay for a low-cost print version.”

The Less Paper office is a driven by mix of complex, often conflicting trends…