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Opinion
Waste Paper: Communications and the Decline of Print
10/4/2007
Who still prints and mails newsletters? Judging from the ones I still get, most are produced either by well funded organizations that can afford to publish and mail print without an expectation of direct revenue or very local organizations, such as a gardening club, which might still have a substantial constituency of people who don't spend much time on line.
Reducing Print on Campus
Now, our students by and large spend a lot of time online, on average about 16 hours a week. But how much time do they spend reading? And what kind of reading do they do? One thing is sure: We don't expect them, or our faculty and staff either, to spend much time reading print that we mail them. Do a Google search on "paperless" and "university," and you'll see that while we all doubt that we can get rid of paper, we're certainly trying hard to do so.
When an institution is successful in reducing large amounts of print, it seems that the motivation is primarily economic. For example, at Sacramento State University, it is estimated that just e-mailing students to go online and check their registration via the Web, instead of mailing them printed reminders, saves the university $70,000 a year. Christopher Dawson, writing at ZDNet, is quite emphatic about the cost of printing things on paper:
Of all of the Education IT purchases you could possibly make, purchasing just one more printer is the least cost-effective of them all!I really love one of his throw-away bits of advice, which parallels precisely what I have intended to end this week's column with anyway. He implies it's time to go and do the equivalent of dumpster-diving: Spend an hour or two on your campus looking into the content of the paper recycling baskets that are all over the place. (Or ask your campus recycling people to look for you and gather some statistics.) It's almost certain that an analysis of what you find in there will give your some ideas about where your institution is spending money printing stuff that needn't be.
Don't believe me? The average business-class laser printer costs in the neighborhood of $2,000 (including extended warranty over its lifetime). Over the life of the device, it will produce at least 2,000,000 simplex pages. If you can buy paper, toner, and consumable printer parts in volume, you will pay close to $40,000 to produce that printed output over the lifetime of that single $2,000 printer!
If you, instead, spend $2,000 on a server, you could provide your students and faculty with instant access to over 50,000,000 pages worth of information for every 100GB of hard drive space on your server!
I've been spending time reading blogs on my handhelds, first a Treo 650 and now an iPhone. If you haven't yet, give it a try. Waiting in line, riding a bus--not so much on subways, which dive underground and cut off signals--it's more than possible to do it; it's actually easy to enjoy doing it. And, so long as you mute the sound or wear headphones, you'll be far less annoying than a "wide stance" newspaper reader.
About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society
for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.
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