Is the Paperless Office Finally Happening?

The paperless office is a great example of a popular technology forecast that has never come true. For at least 3 decades futurists and tech forecasters have declared the imminent decline of paper due to digital technology. 

And for three decades they've been wrong. Paper use - both overall and per capita - has consistently increased over the past 30 years. There is even a book on this topic, The Myth of the Paperless Office. 

But after all this time, it appears that our use of paper may be starting to decline. 

According to the Business Week article The Revolution in How Printers Work, both consumer and business printing demand is shrinking. 

The article references an IDC study that says for the first time the number of printed pages in the U.S. will decline from 1.5 trillion in 2008 to 1.47 trillion in 2009. 

I know in our office we are printing less. But despite this, our use of printers has gone up. Scanning has become more important as has copying. 

We recently added several new standalone printers to replace older models and improve our scanning capability. We chose the Epson Workforce 310 based on price, the paper feeder and the easy to use scanning (we know this because we already have a WorkForce 600 that we use as a wireless group printer). 

Our offices are hardly paperless. But hopefully we were are at least headed in that direction.