It’s been a little over a year since I went largely paperless, as the high-tech crowd would put it. Not entirely by choice, but rather because my printer died and the one we have for the household no longer interacts with any of our three laptops. So much for technology. Alas.
Yes, it can be an annoyance, especially when I have a choral score to print out or my wife’s found some great coupons. But we’ve found ways to cope.
When my printer went kaput, I was already finding that most poetry journals were accepting submissions only online, and that included the printed quarterlies. Keeping duplicate files of online and printout versions was troublesome and led to several embarrassing duplicate acceptances. So I decided to go to online-submissions only, and had only a few instances where I had to decline an opportunity.
Blogging, of course, has allowed me to move many pieces straight to the Internet without using paper, so that’s cleaned up a corner of my studio.
The big breakthrough was the ebook publishing with Smashwords. There’s no more need for multiple printed manuscript copies or files of postal correspondence to cope with. It’s so clean!
Not that the piles of paper don’t continue. Rather, they’re smaller these days. I’ll still pay my bills with a check, thank you, and there are always paper notes for consideration. Admittedly, I used to jest that sorting papers was one of my hobbies. In a way, it still is.
The fact is I love the feel and look of paper when it’s used well – fine stock and good typography, especially, along with masterful photography or illustration. And I still have a lot of that to sort through, to say nothing of all my years of journaling, which I’ve done with fountain pens for nearly two decades now. The old-fashioned fountain pens I ordered the same time I bought a PC that’s long been out of commission. The pens that dance in my hands, unlike this keyboard.
Jnana's Red Barn 
I’m glad you liked our very first post, but I’m even more glad I’ve found yours.
One of the delights of blogging is being part of a wonderful network. All the best!
I live a lot more paperless these days, including reading ebooks, but I do still love the feel of a paperback! It’s hard (but not impossible) to imagine that we could ever stop using paper completely.
I’ve gone paperless when it comes to bills and such, but I just cannot get into my Kindle! Like you said, it’s hard to beat the look and feel of paper. I also love the smell of books. In other paper-related news: This TED Talk is awesome. It’s only 5 minutes and the hilarious speaker talks about how if we all used one paper towel in the public bathroom instead of the standard handful, it would save over 500 million pounds of paper:
Public bathroom paper towels versus the blow-dry alternative is yet another rant we could take up.
As an ebook author, though, I will tout the upside of digital reading. For books, I’m using the ePub with an Adobe reader app on my laptop. It’s not that much different from reading a manuscript, actually. And then here we are, blogging.
Let’s go for the best of both worlds.
I never liked the very high price of printer ink cartridges, and trying the refill alternative yielded unsatisfactory results. I save stuff to file, and back it up, instead.