Paper... we love it and we loathe it. It still exists because we've built a dependance on it despite the fact that we have technology that renders it null and void. We have document formats like ePUB and PDF that allow us to carry around books wherever we go. We have the ability to create these forms of documents so easily especially with the latest update to iWork. We read on the internet and we read e-mails. Our communication has gone from slow pieces of paper being delivered by people on pushbikes to wires that move data in seconds not days. In fact the only real requirement for paper is mopping up spills and wiping our bums.

But reading on screens is hard because screens are in landscape and we read documents in portrait. Reading in portrait on a screen that's in landscape means a lot of scrolling or reducing the text to such a level that we can't read it properly anyway and so many people print stuff out because it's simply too hard to do onscreen.

Then there's lawyers and accountants who require things in triplicate which is in reality moot when you've got a computer document. A good example of the ridiculousness of this is recently when I got my iPad. I refinanced my hire purchase agreement to give me the money to buy the device. I did it all over the phone and I needed to get the information that they required. This meant getting a copy of my passport, a copy of my payslip, and the completed forms of theirs. So what did I do? I filled all of this out, scanned it all, and e-mailed it all to them. That should have been it right? Umm NOPE. I then had to printout the stuff I scanned and at cost to me I had to courier the physical stuff to them. Not only that, I actually had to send two copies of the printed stuff to them. Think about that for a second. I had sent them EVERYTHING they needed via e-mail. If they needed more than one copy of this stuff all they had to do was printout three copies. But no, they wanted me to send the original copy and a photocopy of that to them in the mail. And what's going to happen to all that printed out stuff that was sent to them via mail? It will be scanned into a computer system. The whole process is retarded in the truest sense (and before anyone throws a hissy about my use of the word "retarded" please look it up in the dictionary).

The iPad is going to change all of this. It's going to allow things that we never thought possible and it had to have been Apple to get the ball rolling because the computer industry by and large has failed to do it so far.

While many people lambasted the iPad as being nothing more than a glorified iPod Touch or a large iPhone without the call capabilities and spouting off crap like "this is an evolutionary product not a revolutionary product" I saw the iPad for what it was... a game changer. Anyone who saw it differently clearly isn't in need of one but everyone who uses one realises they need one. In two days of owning my iPad I quickly questioned why we've been using bulky laptops for so long. Downloading the 4 apps I use on a regular occasion - iBooks, Bento, Pages, and Numbers - I quickly realised that what people were saying about the iPad were at best ill-informed. The iPad flicks through data in Bento just as quickly as on my MacBook Pro, more so in some cases. Creating a Pages or Numbers document is just as intuitive as on the desktop version. Reading everything from PDFs to eBooks in iBooks is just a delight. I can save this information and copy it back to my desktop with no problems at all. In essence all needs for paper have disappeared with the iPad... except of course the traditional like I mentioned above which really has no excuse in this day and age.

The thing is that the iPad is making it more acceptable to embrace the technology that has been around for years. 12 years ago working for a small computer retail outfit we did a project for the largest dairy processing plant in the Southern Hemisphere - Kiwi Dairies. While we were doing our project they were also doing another project to move towards a paperless office. They were pretty bang on the money although I don't think they were at all capable of getting rid of paper entirely for the traditional aspect I mentioned above. That was 12 years ago. The technology's only got better and yet there is still copious amounts of paper still being used. Why?

It comes down to the fact that while the technology has been there it hasn't been affordable or usable until the iPad came out and showed us how it should be done. Now computer companies are trying to copy the iPad to varying degrees of success which in itself will increase the decrease of paper use. According to the EPA in America 85 million tons of paper are used yearly by Americans. That's only America. Throw in the rest of the world and we're talking about entire countries worth of trees being removed just to make paper products. Of that 85 million tons used 4 million tons of that is discarded. To put that into perspective that's roughly a 4m high wall from New York to California solely of paper and that's only America.

I was speaking to the Chief of Staff for the Prime Minister while I was setting up the Prime Minister's iPad (oh yeah those are the circles I roll with :-) ) and he explained to me how much he was loving iBooks. He said to me that he had pretty much removed the need for printing stuff out for his own use now. He doesn't print stuff out for meetings now he just simply carries his iPad with him with the PDF uploaded into his iPad. Now think about this from his perspective. On average an American generates around 70Kgs of paper a year. That's roughly how much I weigh. That's a lot of paper. So say Mr Chief of Staff to the PM printed out on average a 20 page PDF for every meeting he went to and he went to say 20 meetings a week that's 400 pages a week. That works out to be 1.8Kgs a week or 93.6Kgs a year and that's only 1 person. All of this is of course conservative and also not indicative of the general population but if one person is saving 93.6 kilograms a year simply by reading PDFs and Word documents on an iPad that over everyone is a huge savings. To put that into perspective let's take Mr Chief of Staff of the PM's example and apply that to the amount of iPads sold up to the end of July. 93.6 * 3,270,000 = 306,072,000 kilograms of paper saved by everyone reading from an iPad. In other words we save 306,072 TONNES of paper a year simply by reading from an iPad.

And this is what my point is. The iPad is changing the way we use paper. Because our attitude towards paper is being changed it is having an impact on our environment... for the better. If this isn't the definition of a game changer then I don't know what is. The iPad has changed the way people work, it's changed the way people think, and it's got the potential to completely change the planet. What other device for less than $2000 does that on such a scale?

But that's not the end of it. In my next post I will talk about another way in which the iPad can change our perception of computer use.