The little things

I spent two years working at an Innocence Project in Pittsburgh. The job involved scouring thousands of letters from prisoners who claim they’re wrongfully convicted of the crimes that landed them behind bars and then writing journalism about the very few innocence claims that seem legitimate.

Reading these letters — and pursuing leads on promising cases — it’s clear that prisoners do not have access to the web or any other form of digital communication. This is for security reasons, we’re told by prison administrators. So every page of every trial transcript needs to be copied and mailed. There are literally thousands of pages of certain criminal trial transcripts and other assorted court documents. And all correspondence with prisoners happens via post, in actual physical letters. Mere conversations with prisoners can fill cubic feet of boxes with paper.

Prisoners are not the only group of people who use paper every day

Of course, prisoners are an aberration; there are 1.9 million people in lockup nationwide (PDF), which only amounts to about 0.6 percent of the overall U.S. population.

But, at least regarding paper use, maybe they’re not an aberration. Prisoners are not the only population lacking access to reliable computers with secure Internet connections. Prisoners are not the only population befuddled by the process of transforming a piece of paper into an image on a screen. Prisoners are not the only group of people who use paper every day.

The Myth of the Paperless Office is the quintessential book about paper in the digital world. Its authors — a cognitive psychologist, Abigail J. Sellen; and a digital researcher, Richard H. R. Harper, who now conduct research for Microsoft — point out that paper is just easier to use in some cases. For obvious reasons, they offer the collaborative process involved in writing a book as an example:

“[W]hen one of us finishes some work on a chapter, we print it out and hand it to the other. We read it, mark it up, and then discuss it by flipping through the marked-up pages together. There is the proofreading process: we print out the final version of each chapter to catch the surface-level errors (typos, spelling, and grammar) and, more important, to get a sense of the text and the way it flows. Finally, there is the importance of the paper as a tangible object. Ultimately, we want a bound volume in hand — a physical product that testifies to our efforts and that we can hand to family, friends, and colleagues.”

In a 2002 review of the book, Malcolm Gladwell romanticizes similar processes. In Gladwell’s view, an office devoid of paper is often unproductive. “In the tasks that face modern knowledge workers, paper is most useful out in the open, where it can be shuffled and sorted and annotated and spread out,” he writes. “The mark of the contemporary office is not the file. It's the pile.”

It’s a luxury, of course (and some might say it’s a waste), to print entire book chapters or make productivity piles in the office just so you can collaborate and edit with a pen rather than a cursor. And both The Myth of the Paperless Office and Gladwell’s review of it were both published a decade ago. So perhaps things have changed?

Apparently not.

Despite whatever we may think about digital advances and their influence on paper usage, the amount of paper used globally since 1980 has increased by about half. And books certainly aren’t going the way of the dodo; while ebooks have grown immensely in recent years, some paperback and hardcover book markets are still growing.

Maybe the cost benefit of going paperless simply doesn’t match the inconvenience of fundamentally altering everything we do with paper. What would it cost to eliminate whatever security concerns paper instills among prison administrators? What would it cost to recondition authors not to print chapters during the editing process? What would it cost to inspire office workers to collaborate in a different way?

While I’ve not read any comprehensive estimates about what it would cost to make a city such as Chicago “completely paperless,” Paul N. Courant and Matthew “Buzzy” Nielsen wrote an essay called, “On the Cost of Keeping a Book.” It’s on page 81 of this PDF. And it’s worth thinking about.

And going completely paperless may be more difficult than simply declaring a war on the tyranny of paper waste

Courant and Nielsen put the cost of storing a book in a high density library stack at $28.77 annually. It costs less than half that — around $13.10 — to store a book electronically in a redundant, backed up format that won’t be lost forever if a server unexpectedly catches fire or floods or otherwise loses data. There’s a cost savings in going digital, yes. But it’s an eventual cost savings. And it assumes libraries — or archives or government agencies — can acquire the funding and expertise necessary to introduce and then carry out a digital conversion. Easier said than done. As the authors point out: “Storing and providing access to electronic material is indeed expensive and poses many problems, both technical and economic.”

The Myth of the Paperless Office addresses the cost issue, too: In 2002, the authors cite “best estimates” showing that paper forms are the major paper expenditure in U.S. offices. At the time, an estimated $1 billion was spent on designing and printing those forms but between $25 and $35 billion was spent “maintaining, updating, and distributing” them. “[T]he cost of dealing with paper forms after they are produced vastly outweighs the cost of producing them,” the authors write. That means administrative costs, not material costs, are the main expense. So eliminating paper only solves a small piece of the money problem.

Which is to say Reinhardt’s funding shortage and his hesitancy about going paperless at the Illinois state archives is not unique. And going completely paperless — in prisons, in book publishing, and especially in a massive city government such as Chicago’s by 2015 — may be more difficult than simply declaring a war on the tyranny of paper waste.

In October, the Emanuel administration released its 2013 budget overview. It is 187 pages (PDF) of single-spaced text about how the City of Chicago plans to spend nearly $3 billion next year. It contains exactly one paragraph about paper, with no specific amount given for paperless expenditures and technology investments related to going paperless. It says, by 2013, “approximately 48,000 taxpayers are expected to file tax returns and real property tax declarations online.” The City will also “distribute employees’ statements of earnings and W2s electronically” by 2013, and employees will be able to scan “invoices and vouchers for electronic storage and retrieval.”

In all, that sounds good. Paperless payroll, online tax returns, electronic storage.

But speaking of aberrations: Consider that Chicago has 2.7 million residents. If 48,000 are filing online tax forms, that equals only 1.7 percent of the overall population. And the two major changes this year involve digital W2s and scanning invoices that have already been printed on paper.

I guess it’s the little things that matter.

A Chicago nonprofit group called the Uhlich Children’s Advantage Network or UCAN attempted to go paperless a few years back. Walter Grauer, Vice President of Information Technology at UCAN, says the group initially pursued a paperless office because UCAN wanted to “go green.” But they quickly realized they could actually save some money if they were more efficient.

“‘Going green’ is one thing, but it needs to have an added benefit for costs,” he says. “You need to be saving money as well as paper.”

What they found is that the biggest general wastes in their office were paper timesheets and people clicking “print” at their desktops and then forgetting to pick up what they’d printed from the printer. The answer: Electronic timesheets. And now employees are required to physically stand up and push a button on the printer if they want to print something; they need to click print twice — once at their desktop, once at the printer itself.

With small changes, Grauer says they reduced their printing output by about 300,000 sheets of paper every month. They print a lot of paper — 300,000 is about seven percent of their monthly output — but still, he says: “It saved some cash, definitely.”