Consider a blank piece of paper. You can focus your consciousness on its whiteness to achieve a state of Zen bliss. You can fold it into an airplane, a duck, or any other origami shape. More important, you can store things on it. In fact, paper is the greatest storage medium ever invented. Ever since the ancient Egyptians pounded papyrus into paper six-thousand years ago, paper has recorded our greatest thoughts (the text of the Dead Sea Scrolls) and our most banal (the lyrics for the Beatles' She Loves You). It is the ideal low-density storage medium. If you write on it with a pencil, it is erasable and rewritable. If you use a pen, it is write-once. Paper can hold black-and-white or color, and it's good for multimedia, able to hold both text and graphics. Paper is read optically, by viewing the contrast in light reflecting from its surface. As a result, you can read the same words again and again without wearing out the paper. A paper page can be read in detail or quickly scanned. Even a great number of pages allows random access and can be easily bookmarked. Whether it holds something beautiful (the Mona Lisa), something profound (the Declaration of Independence) or something that fills the blank space between two ads (``Signals''), paper is simply great. Despite technologists' predictions of a paperless society (predictions that are usually printed on paper), I suspect that paper will be around for a long, long time.
Ken C. Pohlman, Stereo Review, January 1997