Resumen
Its been over 20 years since Xerox coined the phrase "the paperless office." This was the prevailing conventional wisdom when mainframes arrived, and again with the advent of personal computer, the office-wide network, the laptop, and most recently, the World-Wide Web. Each new development in computer technology promises a new degree of storage, connectivity, or portability that seems to diminish the dominance of the printed press, now a 400-year-old technology. But print hasn't vanished, and is not likely to do so for the foreseeable future. Because the printed word is, for many purposes, a better technology. This would be true even without the first-mover advantage to print. Many of the original 16th-century Gutenberg bibles are still around and readily readable-provided you can read Latin-yet it is not easy to find a way to read the documents on an 8-year-old floppy disk. Moreover the useful lives of current electronic data storage methods are measured in years, not centuries. The bottom line is that print, for all its recent challenges, remains for many applications simply a superior technology.