Paper Is Good...(paper industry spreading FUD about reading online?)

One thing I think this article ignores is that there's a specific tipping point at which it makes sense for a given publisher to drop paper, much like there's one for when they should adopt digital in the first place. We've seen the latter for most publishers, but we haven't yet seen the former for many at all. It'll be different for every publisher, with certain things (e.g. tech books) coming earlier than others, but it definitely exists. It'll be interesting to see where it is for different publishers, and what ends up remaining paper for a long time to come.

Another thing I just considered on the same subject: despite that the tipping point is different for each publisher, if half the publishers in the world have killed paper printing, it'll likely accelerate the other half to do the same due to the lack of economies of scale; despite that demand is down, production costs may well increase. So perhaps there's a more universal tipping point here.

There are two things I like about paper that make it superior to viewing text on an LCD or CRT (for most forms of text that exist), that unfortunately the article, which is FUD shill from the paper industry, doesn't cover.

1. Ease of annotation and manipulation.

I can mark up text with physical writing implements much more easily than I can with an annotation tool in some document viewer. Personally I find this critical for absorbing material like technical papers and lecture notes. Especially for mathematical notes.

The best electronic-display approximation to this would be a tablet that doubles as a display, such as the Wacom Intuos. The iPad and Kindle are the closest alternatives if it is not important to annotate text. Even then, big sacrifices are made in manipulability.

Probably the best thing about paper is the fact that I can get one piece of paper at much less cost than an iPad or Kindle. It's not just that you can do some task on a single sheet of paper better than you can on the iPad app that tries to replicate that task. It's that the cost difference also applies for N pieces of paper versus N iPads; there are tasks that operate on multiple sheets of paper that are hard to do with the usual solutions that exist today for this, which are window managers. Either window managers need to get a lot better (I've used Windows + WinSplit, xmonad, Divvy and a few other attempts at reigning in the horrible wm in OS X), or there needs to be better hardware for doing so. Multitouch trackpads might be a good starting point.

2. How it interacts with ambient light.

I find that reading text on paper is much easier on the eyes than reading an electronic imitation of it. This is because of how unreadable electronic text is in comparison:

a. Content creators tend toward black text on white backgrounds. This is much higher contrast than you get with black text/white background for paper. The readability of the content is worse the higher the contrast ratio of your display.

b. The rest tend toward a variation of white text on black backgrounds. That is almost as bad.

c. Monitor settings. The monitor's brightness needs to be appropriate for both the amount of ambient light and the content being displayed in particular. There are solutions like Apple's laptop LCD displays that depend on ambient light, but in general the monitor setting is more often the wrong setting than the right one because of (a, b) content being used together frequently + the hassle of adjusting the brightness and ignorance of 'correct' brightness settings in general.

This is where I think there might be an electronic solution; for instance, how about a PDF viewer or display driver hook that remaps the colors of the documents to something more bearable? You can sidestep (a, b) and somewhat mitigate (c) if you say, assume that everyone is using the highest (or default, or as a customizable) setting on their monitors. You already see this with just about every fancy vim/textmate color scheme, and more relevantly, the Inverse scheme of the Readability bookmarklet.