U.S. output of printed pages on decline since Q4 2008, says IDC analyst; number could go down by more than 10% this year amid job losses, shift to digital

Dec 23, 2009 — The Gazette (Montreal)
By RICK MONTGOMERY

MONTREAL, December 23, 2009 (The Gazette (Montreal)) — For 35 years, prophets of the "paperless office" have been waiting for any convincing shred of evidence that people in the U.S. are less committed to paper.

The paradox of the digital age, at least until the economy soured, is a Web-connected, wireless world was using far more paper than it did before trashing its typewriters.

But with greater access to information comes the convenience of the printer, the 100-copy click and Mapquest directions you toss in your car.

As well, book sales and global paper production keep rising, and holiday shoppers remain miffed by gift receipts the length of their arms.

About a year ago, however, Jake Wang noticed a reversal in one trend he has tracked for years from his office in Los Angeles.

Using computer software that monitors the whirring of 700,000 printers and multifunctional devices in businesses, Wang charted the first-ever drop in the number of pages people in the U.S. were printing.

"It was like going over a waterfall," said Wang, an analyst for business consulting and market-research firm IDC.

"Starting with the fourth quarter of 2008, we saw a definite drop in page outputs," which nonetheless totalled 1.5 trillion pages for the year - or 5,000 sheets of printouts per man, woman and child.

That number will be lower this year, perhaps by more than 10 per cent, although it had been climbing steadily since 2000. A temporary effect of the slower economy or the beginning of a society truly less glued to paper?

"When an economy sheds millions of workers, there are that many employees who aren't doing the printing," Wang said. "I'm thinking fewer contracts are signed. Fewer documents sent from one person to another."

He expects our passion for printouts to climb again when the economy does, maybe in 2011.

But the dip in pages printed does parallel a downward slide in the number of pieces of first-class mail being delivered by the United States Postal Service, which peaked in 2006.

Postal officials do not anticipate ever delivering so many cards, letters and utility bills again, even after the recovery.

Experts have envisioned the dawn of a paperless society ever since a Business Week article in 1975 described "The Office of the Future."

The late George Pake, a St. Louis physicist with Xerox Corp., prophesied "a TV-display terminal and a keyboard sitting on every desk.

"We will be able to call up documents on the screen from stored files. By simply pressing a button, we will be able to get mail messages from others," Pake said.

Spot-on as predictions go. Yet since then, annual consumption of paper around the world has more than tripled, according to the World Resources Institute.

"The idea of a paperless society? It will never happen, and I do believe that," Xerox senior vice-president Jim Joyce said. "But the idea of paperless is happening."

By that he means we really ought to be using less paper in the coming decade because of the convergence of four trends:

Pressure on businesses to cut costs where they can, especially in a weak economy.

Technology that will reduce paper output, erase printouts and make reading off a screen easier.

Concerns for the environment with paper manufacturers being the fourth-largest user of fossil fuels on the planet, Joyce said.

The rise of "digital natives," or people younger than 25.

At Johnson County Community College, the decision a few years back to make course catalogues available only online made perfect sense to students born after the advent of the personal computer, college spokeswoman Julie Haas said.

"They're not the ones we get complaints from," Haas said. Their parents and older students prefer catalogues they can flip through, even though the information could be out of date a few months after printing.

To be sure, generational preferences dictate paper trends. To older people, "there's a psychology to paper, reading something on paper you can hold," said Karen Unger, founder of Florida-based American Document Management Co. "I'm old enough to know: There are people who just really need to have things on paper.

"Yet that feeling of control is something the younger generation doesn't seem to have the need for," she said, particularly those who spent their youth on the couch with a laptop on their bellies.

In his book Slow Reading, 30-something computer enthusiast John Miedema acknowledges his own errors in thinking that a paperless society was imminent:

"Reading short snippets on the Web is convenient, and I consider it wasteful to print them. However, if the content I have found is anything longer than a few pages ... I prefer to read it in print."

A recent Forrester Research survey showed the popularity of electronic bank statements hitting a wall this year, with about half of online consumers sticking to paper statements only. Seniors and baby boomers, when compared with younger people, were twice as likely to voice concerns for privacy and a need to have "the paper version for my records."

Corporations eager to cut costs want the public to come around to paperless. In 2007, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission helped companies shave a huge expense when it lifted the rule enforcing the mandatory mailing of annual reports to shareholders.

A Xerox lab in Canada has invested six years researching a kind of printing paper that, over time, erases itself and can be used again.

One holdup, chemist Adela Goredema said, is that while a few companies want the print to vanish in a day, many others would prefer a more complicated technology in which the words stay for three days or longer.

"Of course, the interest is huge," Goredema said. For printouts that fade to white in 16 hours, "we could've gone out and put it on the market."

"But we want to better understand what our customers really want."

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