You can’t talk about paper usage in the 21st century without mentioning the environment. Of all the reasons to abandon the widespread use of paper, the need to stop cutting down trees would seem the most urgent.

It used to be cut and dried. We walked into a store and bought a 7-inch single or videocassette if we liked a song or movie. None of us had the means to reproduce it in the sort of numbers that would hurt copyright holders too much. But nowadays, an eleven-year-old on the family PC can copy and distribute anything to billions of otherwise paying customers.

But the decline of newsprint trumpeted by everyone from reporters to media barons has another potential victim — the software companies like Quark and Adobe who’ve spent the past 30 years investing billions in desktop publishing, graphic design and publications management applications.