“Paper is no longer the mas­ter copy; the dig­i­tal ver­sion is.”

That’s Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, quoted in an arti­cle in yesterday’s New York Times on the con­cept of the paper­less home. The dream of the paper­less office, it seems, will never be real­ized, in part because paper is such an effi­cient medium for col­lab­o­ra­tion, but also because the com­pany -- not the employee -- usu­ally foots the bill. At home, where “users” are also the pur­chasers of paper and pricey printer ink, there’s more incen­tive to go paper­less. Cost sav­ings are great, but so are clutter-savings. That, cou­pled with inex­pen­sive scan­ners, are lead­ing more (but still very few) house­holds to dig­i­tize receipts, tax returns, busi­ness cards and all other man­ner of daily ephemera that needs to be stored, but doesn’t need to be in your way. Digital cam­eras and MP3s have got­ten us com­fort­able with main­tain­ing valu­able infor­ma­tion in dig­i­tal form. But it doesn’t just have to be pho­tos and music anymore.

Now we bank online, pay bills online, write to each other, buy, sell, and trade -- all online. These trans­ac­tions all used to be recorded with phys­i­cal, paper doc­u­ments, but now they are recorded as dig­i­tal data first, then only expressed phys­i­cally on paper as needed. Utility bills now arrive via email, and even some phys­i­cal inter­ac­tions (such as in-person pur­chases at an Apple Store) trig­ger emailed, digital-only receipts.

What does this mean for us? Less paper sounds good, but locat­ing phys­i­cal doc­u­ments is some­times eas­ier and more effi­cient than find­ing dig­i­tal ones. So search tech­nol­ogy still needs to improve. And paper doc­u­ments don’t dis­ap­pear when, say, cof­fee is spilled on your key­board, or there’s a power surge, or you drop your lap­top down the stairs. So back­ing up will be ever more impor­tant, but so will fil­ing sys­tems. We’ve had years to stan­dard­ize meth­ods of stor­ing and orga­niz­ing phys­i­cal doc­u­ments (visit any library), but how will dig­i­tal doc­u­ments be man­aged? Call me skep­ti­cal, but I don’t think it’s best to leave that up to the end users. We need thought­ful, well-designed soft­ware for man­ag­ing all these dif­fer­ent doc­u­ments before the paper­less home can be as effi­cient and enjoy­able as it sounds.