Name: The myth of the paperless office
ISBN: 9780262692830

The myth of the paperless office

"Over the past thirty years, many people have proclaimed the imminent arrival of the paperless office. Yet even the World Wide Web, which allows almost any computer to read and display another computer's documents, has only increased the amount of printing done by computer users. The use of e-mail in an organization increases paper consumption by an average of 40 percent. In The Myth of the Paperless Office, Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper study paper usage as a way to understand the work that people do and the reasons they do it the way they do. Using the tools of ethnography and cognitive psychology, they look at paper use from the level of the individual up to that of organizational culture."--BOOK JACKET

What Hacker News says

uniqueuidMar 2022

Haha this was a great idea. It demonstrated that many of the hard problems of mobile productivity are "soft" problems in our heads and concepts, not hardware or software problems.

I wish the "note taking app" crowd would think harder about that.

There is a great book about the early age of hype and how it failed, called "The Myth of the Paperless Office" [1]. Would be great to re-read it and see how it holds up.

By the way, there still is a market for hipster PDA gear and some companies seem to make quite a bit of profit with it - here are beautiful note taking index cards with additional gear (dividers, archival boxes and so on) [2]

[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/myth-paperless-office

[2] https://www.thejournalshop.com/brands/Foglietto

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cartoonfoxesApr 2015

> Halfway through and still not a single useful insight. It's just the same cloying nostalgia that caused "bibliophiles" to panic when the Kindle first hit the streets, and apparently still causes them immense anxiety today.

This was my reaction as well. "The Myth of the Paperless Office" (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/myth-paperless-office) is a much better treatise on the utility and relevance of treeware.

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cartoonfoxesFeb 2015

The Myth of the Paperless Office is a wonderful read. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/myth-paperless-office

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sherazJan 2013

Not joining.

I like paper, and I don't care if some think it is wasteful.

I like reading without a screen.

I like the feel in my hands.

It does not require batteries or electricity.

I can doodle and jot in the margins.

It spreads out on my work table as a kind of personal caching system.

It degrades gracefully, unlike a most digital file formats.

I would encourage anyone interested to find a copy of "The Myth of the Paperless office" by Abagail Sellen and Richard Harper [1] (No affiliate link below)

[1] - http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Paperless-Office-Abigail-Sellen/d...

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gigamonkeyNov 2011

You should check out the book The Myth of the Paperless Office. They report research where they gave folks tasks like writing a summary of several magazine articles and one group did it all on a computer and the other did it on paper and they watched how people actually worked. There was a lot of subtle physical interactions in the paper group, such as moving different articles closer and farther away on the table that the computer group tried to do analogues of and failed because of the limitations of the medium. So it's not just the eyes and ears.

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pasbesoinMar 2018

One of the articles that came out apparently around the time of the publishing of "The Myth of the Paperless Office". I recall reading one or more of the articles, back then, and finding sense in them. I never read the book; if I learned of it, back then, I'd forgotten about it.

I don't know whether this is the best of the articles. I seem to recall a longer one. And, this one comes with a "Gladwell" (the author of the article) caution.

"The Social Life of Paper"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/03/25/the-social-lif...

"The Myth of the Paperless Office"

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/myth-paperless-office

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