There have been a number of stories recently covering the iPad that is being used in various government and corporate environments specifically with an eye towards reducing paper usage. Shockingly the ROI for a $500+ item is actually pretty quick in many of these environments.
I find the Canadian government one particularly touching as in a previous life at the beginning of the desktop publishing revolution I managed to push Consumer and Corporate Affairs to accept Times Roman and Helvetica as accepted typefaces for official documents (other than monospaced Courier) in order to save paper. I forget what the exact figures were, but it was over $200,000/year in paper and toner savings. So obviously, eliminating the paper completely is definitely going to save even more.
Despite the plays by RIM, Cisco and Samsung to seduce the enterprise with their tablet offerings, this is one area where the 7’ tablets just can’t compete with the iPad’s form factor. The iPad is nearly the same size as a standard A4 or 8.5’x11’ sheet of paper, and I’ve discovered that when using applications like iBooks with PDF files, the reading experience is very similar. So much so that my workflow for writing documentation has replaced the paper review phase with the iPad.
I used to work on the computer up until a certain point where the document was pretty solid and then I’d print out a copy, sit down with paper, pen and coffee and re-read the document and scribble notes on the paper. There’s something about working on a non-interactive paper environment that lets me see things differently and spot errors that I don’t see in a word processor or a PDF on a vertical screen.
But now, instead of the printing, I print a PDF and ship it off to the iPad into an application like iAnnotate or ReaddleDocs where I can read the document and make annotations. Shipping the PDF by mail back to the Mac where I can see the annotations in Preview and delete them from the PDF file as I take them into account in the original document.
As a result, I haven’t used my printer in over 6 months since adopting this approach.
I find that this is just as effective for document reviews in meetings, since at the end of the meeting I can fire off a copy of the annotated document by mail to the participants and the document owner for applying the updates, something that previously required making photocopies.
On the iPad application front, it’s not yet perfect since I find that the application UIs for the various readers/annotation tools are a bit of a mixed bag. I prefer the iBooks paginated view for reading, but iBook offers only the ability to bookmark pages. While this is great for dealing with my documentation library, it’s less useful for works in progress.
I’m currently torn between iAnnotate for its excellent annotation options (surprise), but less enamored with its page rendering and navigation, and the reverse for ReaddleDocs who’s navigation is closer to iBooks, but offers only limited and less accessible annotation options.
My other use cases on the pseudo paper front are checklists that come in all sorts of situations: installation and upgrade procedures, client reception of validation tests.
Finally PDF will be able to realize the dream of the paperless office!