Toward a paperless world

It is now obvious that the printing industry has been seriously impacted by both the financial crisis and the rise of internet. Even though the economic situation is getting better, I fear the printing industry (to the exception of packaging) might not be able to recover because the web is more and more replacing printed communications.

Here are few examples of this substitution from paper to paperless:
- Newspapers, and tomorrow magazines and books will be replaced by the Kindle, iPad and similar devices.
- Ebay, Craigslist and Monster overtook the entire classified ad business.
- Encyclopedia, law books are now on CDs or online.
- Audio CDs (and therefore CD sleeve) are replaced by MP3 players.
- Sales brochures, company brochures, product presentations have been replaced by company websites.
- Photos are now kept digital, and are no longer printed.
- Invitations, letterheads, envelopes have been replaced by emails
- Invoices, utility and bank statements are now electronic.

Going paperless offers many advantages, it is more ecological, it reduces inventory and paper waste, it is more efficient, faster and easier to update. However, I don’t feel comfortable with this idea of paperless. Think that it is the first time since antiquity humanity no longer prints on a physical media directly readable by human eye. Imagine that for an unknown reason computers disappear: all the knowledge stored in hard drives becomes no longer readable. And what about hard drives? Are they sustainable? How long are they supposed to last? Some experts say less than a hundred years…

Information is now going to the clouds. As you know, clouds are actually real datacenters which include thousands of servers. Thankfully, these servers are redundant, which means information is stored in different places. But these datacenters are subject to potential security threats: virus, terrorist attacks, etc…

Yes, we are at a turn of the Human history, we are heading to a route where knowledge is not stored in books anymore but in the clouds. We are stepping into the digital era. I fear that everything can disappear with a blink of an eye. At least, printing information on books guaranteed that information was kept for a long period of time, it was directly readable, and it was harder to destroy as books are spread all over the world.

I believe the transition to paperless is unavoidable, though. Many companies are going to disappear, while many others will appear to offer online publishing. There is specifically one company, which revolutionized the printing industry 25 years ago that needs to reinvent itself: it is Adobe. Adobe was indeed founded because of PostScript, a page description language, designed specifically for print applications and desktop publishing. Thanks to Postscript and its desktop publishing applications, Adobe totally changed the printing industry. My feeling is that Adobe has now the best technology (PDF, DRM, Flash) to make the transition from printing to paperless publishing, but as for every transition, there exist threats from other companies to take over the market. And one company willing to lead the market could be Apple.

Between Adobe and Apple, it is a long story: In 1984, while the Macintosh encountered commercial difficulties, Steve Jobs urged Adobe to implement PostScript in the Apple LaserWriter. The LaserWriter is said to have allowed Apple to survive and the Macintosh to become a commercial success.

Today the alliance between Apple and Adobe seems to be in danger because Apple refuses to implement Flash on iPhone/iPad. I suspect this decision was a sort of revenge from Apple (i.e. Steve Jobs) when Adobe preferred developing its applications on PC first, while everything went wrong for Apple in 1996-97 and Apple desperately needed Adobe's support to survive.

Even though Apple made a risky bet by not implementing Flash on its iPad, this decision could harm Adobe, because Apple has a dominant position in the media distribution: music and video today, books and magazines tomorrow.

On the other hand, Apple may lose its dominant position because many experts predict that Google Android will beat Apple in 2011. The main reason for this is that Apple is not licensing its iphone/iPad system to other manufacturers. Apple is also restricting the current supply of its devices, by having a restrictive distribution strategy. Google has the exact opposite strategy by selling as many as possible Android licenses to several manufacturers. Android supports Adobe Flash and apparently, Google is developing an Android-based tablet. Lastly, Google is in the process of digitizing complete libraries all other the world. So, the solution for Adobe might be to make a strategic alliance with Google because there are obvious synergies between both companies. This alliance would enable Google to take advantage of Adobe's publishing technology (DRM, PDF, Flash) and Adobe to leverage Google's presence in the consumer market, and eventually to lead the paperless world, as it used to lead desktop publishing in the paper era.