Scribbles Will Survive The Paperless Revolution

It seems everyone is getting on this paperless band wagon these days. Only yesterday I wrote about the new A4 sized E-paper developed by Epson.

Well today folks its Wacom (made famous by their drawing tablets) in partnership with E Ink announcing they have made a pen input e-paper.

They are describing it as “the ultimate version of an interactive piece of paper” and I agree, its all very well to be able to read books or newspapers on e-paper but its the scribbles that make paper what it is. The ability to take a pen and paper and create anything you like is why we love it so much. Paper is one of the most versatile piece of kit that we have and so can’t be easily replaced.

I can’t help feeling that while we have the illusion of moving forward with this technology we are in fact taking two steps back. Is it not the goal of technology to make improvements on the past, to make more things do… well more things? At the moment it seems that when we finally hit the paperless society, instead of having one piece of e-paper that can do everything actual paper can do, we’ll have a huge range of e-papers for specific tasks.