Opinion: But some seem to be forging on, as eCopy announces paper-saving PDF capture portal systems that hook into all major digital copiers.Being a proud, card-carrying member of Generation X used to mean that people would market cool stuff to me, and that I held mind-boggling power over trend trackers who took my responses to surveys and my buying choices at the cash register, you know, seriously.
Now, it mostly means that I'm the old clown who doesn't know when he's holding the Sony PSP upside down, or who takes way too long to manage the intricate, three-remote-control sequence needed to switch from TiVo to the DVD player.
It also means, however, that wizened, middle-aged hippies were in charge of shaping my ideals back when I was in college. They hard-coded the "think globally, act locally" concept into my idealistic little Midwestern college-student moral firmware, especially when it comes to recycling.
To this day, I'm followed in my car and house by little piles of packaging destined for the recycling bin. I think long and hard before printing documents, especially when they're more than five or six pages. I get frustrated when I find that I've bought something in "No. 5 plastic" at the grocery store, because our city recycling program takes only ones and twos.
With this in mind, it should come as no surprise that, when given the task of shaping the PDFzone "Champions of PDF" series of interviews several years ago—comprising 10 boilerplate questions and 10 tailored to the subject's particular area of expertise—one standing question I asked was, "When will the paperless office become a reality?"
The hippie-morals programming team would have been proud of this leading question, which boldly assumed that there was a "green" endpoint to which PDF technology was taking us. Back then, people called PDFs "e-paper," and some marketers touted their roles in "the e-paper revolution," which sounded vaguely like something the Jefferson Airplane would sing about. (Kids, an item from the Fogey File: We used to put "E"s in front of words to come up with names for new, cool stuff; that trend got left back in the 1990s, along with the Ford Festiva and Dennis Rodman.)
At first, my interviewees politely guffawed at the question. Most of them said "never" and went on to explain why. Tired of getting guffawed at, I tried asking it this way, "Crossfire"–style: "Paperless office—myth ... or reality?" That got some more enthusiastic responses along the lines of, "Myth, and let me tell you why: Because people still need paper ... "
But that wasn't what I wanted to hear. Instead, I was fishing for a sentiment more like, "In 20 years, PDF will have replaced paper." E-paper, you know? Just the way e-mail replaced real mail for personal and business correspondence. And the way Word files with revision tracking replaced my need to interact with my editors through paper manuscripts marked in red pen.
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Finally, the 30-something oldster who typically governs my brain took over and put down the e-paper revolution in my mind that my inner idealist had fostered. Jaded, I started asking the question something like this: "Is the paperless office a figment of the media's imagination, and it was never gonna happen in the first place?"
"Pretty much," my subjects answered, sometimes following up with something to the effect of, "At one point, I was pretty sure PDF would mostly but not entirely replace paper, but I'm looking around my office right now as I'm saying this, and I have more paper than I ever did."
Collectively, the champions of PDF had pretty much given up on the paperless office once they realized that PDF can help make billions of documents on hard drives and on the Web more quickly and cheaply accessible—but the technology couldn't stanch the general growth of documents in business, and the need for more and more and more information.
But in my town—Nashua, N.H.—one company, eCopy, is still doing its best to light a fire under the e-paper revolution with an ongoing effort to turn all six million digital copiers in the United States and 19 million more abroad into PDF conversion portals, instead of icons fueling our culture of waste just like the unholy combination of SUVs and the Exxon Valdez.
eCopy started working with Canon digital copiers a decade ago by adding its ScanStation hardware-software touchscreen system, which takes paper, turns it into OCR'd e-paper and routes it to wherever the user specifies, be it the person's desktop machine, document-management system, or even e-mail or fax.
Four years ago, the company started building an open-platform system into which all copiers—using either external TWAIN interfaces or proprietary, embedded interfaces—would eventually be able to connect to the eCopy ShareScan software running on the ScanStation PC terminal.
The platform makes its debut this week at eCopy's Paper Connection event in Miami along with ShareScan OP 3, the first product for that platform, as well as programs for copier manufacturers and ISVs to facilitate paper-to-PDF conversion via ShareScan.
Because eCopy does the integration work with all of the copier manufacturers, software vendors only have to port their applications to ShareScan instead of to many proprietary operating systems such as those contained in Canon, Oce, Sharp, Ricoh, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba copiers. ShareScan also offers pipes to Documentum, Interwoven and Hummingbird systems, as well as to Microsoft desktop business apps.
eCopy plans to ship these new products sometime in the second quarter of this year.
PDF takes center stage in eCopy's world: Not only is it the electronic document format that eCopy's customers demand and use, but it helps eCopy satisfy customers' needs—especially in regulated industries—for user-defined security. eCopy systems can output to TIFF and JPEG, but that's a token gesture: Not only do most people prefer PDF, but in the case of legal documents, many courts require it.
"We see [PDF] as, obviously, a standard, and we see it as something more and more customers are rallying around," says Tim Corkery, eCopy's senior vice president. "We use it as a selling strategy."
Interestingly, the selling point eCopy isn't flogging is the ecological benefit of its systems. They like to talk about how scanning paper to PDF saves time in distributing documents among office workers in the enterprise, and how it saved one company millions in overnight courier fees. They throw around business terms like the almighty ROI.
But what they're doing is, one sheet at a time, taking data on paper that would have been copied onto another piece of paper and instead copying it to a PDF and sending it on its merry way into the network. Preventing more waste. Saving the backs of lumberjacks from coast to coast. Trying to make the paper document into a figment of pulp fiction.
So, does this really, finally, mean paper's on the outs? I'd compromise—I'd be willing to blow up my "paperless office" ideal and replace it with "less-paper office" or even "orderly-piles-of-paper office" instead of what it's like now. But the paperless office might yet be coming! Systems such as eCopy's have got to be the proof that the tide is turning and the use of paper is on the decline, right?
"It's actually growing," Corkery says. "There are studies out that say it's in the trillions of pages each year. We don't see any decline in the use of paper."
His theory is not that PDF is losing the battle against paper, but that information is proliferating. We've got more things to know and understand in order to do our jobs, and both paper and PDF help us keep up. eCopy public relations man Bill Brikiatis adds that while idealists might like the way eCopy is taking its hacks at paper's stronghold in the office, the realists back in the company's boardroom understand what's really going on.
"We based our business on the fact that paper's not going away," Brikiatis says. "There's been an explosion of information transfer, and in a lot of cases that's not electronic information transfer—it's between two different organizations or individuals, using paper."
Oh well, I shouldn't have gotten excited about the paperless office thing. As the hippie professor who liked to quote The Who would tell me, maybe next time we won't get fooled again.
Next week, a related topic: Is the proliferation of unstructured documents turning PDF into the Web's content garbage barge?
Don Fluckinger is a freelance writer based in Nashua, N.H., who has covered Acrobat and PDF technologies for PDFzone since 2000.
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