American Airlines completed its transition to “paperless cockpits” this year, after giving pilots iPads in place of the 3,000-plus pages of documents and manuals they used to carry.
At professional services group PwC, meanwhile, staff must walk to a printer and enter a passcode to produce their hard copy – an extra step that was designed to cut the waste created by uncollected printouts.
If the paperless workplace is finally arriving, as these examples suggest, it is worth asking whether there is a difference between reading on screens and on paper – and whether all screens are created equal.
Anne Mangen, an associate professor at the University of Stavanger in Norway who specialises in reading, says the answer depends on the complexity of the content and the type of screen.
For skimming a short message, the medium may not matter, adds Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University in the US.
But a screen is not necessarily best suited to “deep” reading, where the aim is to pick up more insight and come up with novel thoughts. In this situation, she says: “Paper seems to offer some advantages.”