Death of Hard Copy aka Death of Printing

 The year of 2000; inkjet and laser printers are everywhere. Everybody printed.  Let's discuss what was printed at home. In 2000, it was: 

student work (schools and colleges)

formal letters 

photos 

legal documents (contracts etc.)

driving directions

instructions and manuals

books and brochures

Fast forward to 2020s-  most of it is gone. Everything is now sitting on the phones, on computers, or, often on the cloud/internet.

The digital/digitized content so much better; tit is searchable, archivable, interactive, and often editable. And it is always with you, in your pocket, on your phone!

Some examples from my life.  

1. Photos. In 2000s, I was so much into photo printing. Whatever I  made photographs of, I wanted to print out! The photos ended up in huge folders sitting on my bookshelf.  I never really opened those folders.  They ended in recycling bin not so much later. In about 2005, I started to go the other way; all my hard copy prints that did not have their digital copies were scanned and digitized. I have to say, I browse my digital files more often than the  hard copy files. In 2025, my photos are either on my phone (always with me) or on the cloud (website, blogs). They also sit on my mainframe hard drive as a backup.

2. Books. We have a good library of actual physical hard copy books that sits on our shelves. It includes for example a wonderful Encyclopedia Britannica.   I use it very little. I  mostly use my Amazon Kindle account where I have about 100 or so books stored. I switched to digital books in about 2010.

3. Legal documents (real estate, rental contracts). All of them are still mostly hard copies. However, when we were buying a summer house, all the initial real estate transactions were virtual via DocuSign. One of my rentals is handled via DocuSign, the other is still a hard copy. The transition has happened at about 2020.

4. Driving directions.  There was a time when I was printing my driving directions, (or was using a Garmin Navigator). in about 2010, Garmin Navigators became bad (not sure why). In the same time, the phones became  much better. From 2015 on, I am using only IPhones for my navigation, and I also stopped printing.

5. Hiking Maps.  I used to print my maps; now it is on AllTrails on my phone.

6. Homework and teaching assignments. I was briefly teaching at USD, in 2020-2021. There were multiple online platforms there to give assignments and to grade them; one of them was called BlackBoard. The students posted their assignments online.   There was essentially no printing involved. This is quite different  from the time when my children were in schools and colleges (2000-2010). Then, essentially every assignment needed to be printed.

7. Quick notes for yourself/scribbles. I use Iphone features such as quick video or photos. For example, if I need to get a schedule of a swimming pool, and it is not posted online, I just snap a photo.  When I repair something, and it needs to be disassembled, I make photos and videos in the process.