“Please do not print this mail if it is not necessary”, this is one of the many sentences that can be found at the bottom of e-mail messages inviting you to limit printing on paper with ink. Printers are certainly a less used tool than in the past, thanks to the deeper digitization of documents and archiving systems, even if they are still necessary for many areas. So much so that the market is constantly declining and, in 2021 alone, it recorded a contraction in Italy of 23.7%. What are the reasons why these devices are used less and less? We have isolated seven of the most significant ones.
Eco-sustainability
Paper, ink/toner, electricity consumption, it’s easy to count how many resources are used to print any document. Digital files also consume and pollute , but to a lesser extent. On the printer side, the future will certainly be a little greener thanks to solutions such as cold inkjets promoted by Epson which will say goodbye to laser printing, but avoiding printing if not necessary is always advisable.
Storage
Although very thin, the sheets of paper soon produce a considerable amount of space requiring folders, boxes and containers which can in turn clog up wardrobes and spaces in the home or office. Files can be archived on digital memories such as USB sticks or portable hard drives ( here is a selection of the best ones ) or on the cloud with the free space available, which is often already sufficient.
Internal research and cataloguing
It often happens to think how nice a Ctrl+F would be when looking for a term or phrase in pages and pages of paper, a bit like on pdfs or even productivity documents. Furthermore, even the documents themselves are easier to recover in digital libraries with the tools made available by the various operating systems from Windows to MacOs but also Android and iOS.
Sharing
To share a single sheet or a search from hundreds of pages, just a click if it is in digital format, they can be easily attached to emails, sent via app or via bluetooth or even passed through physical media
Custom readability
If you are visually impaired or have specific viewing preferences, with just a few adjustments you can zoom, change contrast, switch to dark mode and so on with maximum customization. You can also choose your favorite software to open various documents.
Extrapolation
To extract portions of text or even tables or photos from a file, little effort is needed, which instead increases exponentially when you have to work on paper support, so much so that in these cases it is almost a must to go from the scanner to digitize.
costs
Finally, one can only end with the costs, given that in addition to the price of a printer and its maintenance, there are also those of the reams of paper, the containers and the electricity consumed with daily use. Files also have costs (storage/display media and electricity), which are significantly lower, however.
