Stop using paper already

The rain forest is becoming more extinct each day. The time has come to shift from using paper to in fact use our computers for storing documents. The major issue why this has not already been done is the fact that people enjoy reading news papers and magazines without having to sit in front of the computer. Luckily, there is a solution called E-ink being developed and several concept devices already exist today.

The Sony reader for instance is displayed to the right is using the new E-ink technology, which means that it only needs power when changing the display. That leads to longer time between charges, and that is good for everyone.

There is also lots of paper besides news papers out there, and lots of it is obviously unnecessary. The problem is that you will still receive lots of documents on paper, which screws up your nice paperless Zen space. No problem here though — Using a fairly modern scanner and an OCR(Optical Character Recognition) software, it is easy to scan everything into the computer, making the paper redundant and which can then be recycled.

Tracy over at The Student tablet PC has a number of articles dealing with the issues of going paperless. To make it easier to decide what to scan and what to trash, she has designed a nice flow-chart to make it a no-brainer.

To read some more about E-ink, have a look at the MobileRead forums. This is also where the article images come from, so they have some more information regarding the devices too. How stuff works also has a nice article describing how E-ink works.