The power of digital documents in a digital world
A computer is like a hammer or any other tool. Its role is not to make our lives more complicated, but to make performing tasks faster, easier, and more cost effective. The key to harnessing this productivity is to bridge the real world with the digital world. This bridge is easily constructed with the increasing use of eBooks and eDocuments.
Let’s look at some of the ways digital documents get the job done:
- Richer experience. Not just text and photos. Digital documents can carry audio clips, video clips, interactive applications, and links to related subjects and information.
- Instant access and recall. Search capabilities today allow users to search for documents and through them. Look for a document by name or search through all your documents to find specific words or phrases in seconds – try doing that with a shelf full of books or a stack of boxes containing archived files.
- Quick communication of complex ideas. Sent by email, posted on a private network, or accessed over the internet, communication of complex ideas is easy. Media rich presentations can be sent to select people in a working group or thousands of content subscribers.
- Simple storage. Rows of shelves, filing cabinets and archive boxes are being replaced with MB, GB, and Terabytes of space on hard drives. That ‘I know I’ll need it as soon as I throw it out’ pile that clutters our desks and drawers never needs to go and never needs to take up any more space than a file folder on the computer screen.
- Secure storage. Disasters happen. A fire can destroy all the real world books, documents, photos and other files that are irreplaceable to a business or individual. Digital documents can be backed-up offsite every week, every day, or even in real time, automatically, making recovery from a disaster possible and more probable than ever.
The content capability of digital documents is increasing with speech recognition and synthesis, full motion video, and interactive 3D modeling. Whether using Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat, or any one of the numerous other software technologies available, digital documents allow us to experience, access, share, and safeguard more information than ever before.
Typewriters are a thing of the past. It may not be too long before paper documents of all kinds are also, only found in museums.