Readers Still Prefer the Printed Word

Report says electronic media won't replace traditional forms

By David Lazarus
Chronicle Staff Writer

Remember all that talk about electronic media making paper-based communications obsolete? Yeah, right.

A report from the Boston Consulting Group predicts that paper consumption will continue to rise worldwide and that the paper industry will thrive.

Sure, Web publishing will grow in prominence, and more and more people will use e-mail. But many readers will remain reluctant to give up their books, newspapers and magazines.

"Predictions about the electronic substitution of paper-based media are often excessive," BCG Vice President Harri Andersson said in the report.

He noted that for all the practicality of electronic media, "most paper applications provide portability and ease of use, as well as a certain privacy of use."

For this reason, he tosses the notion of a paperless office in the trash can and predicts that consumption of precut office paper will double by 2003.

But this isn't to say that traditional media have it easy. Newspapers in particular will have their work cut out for them as online resources steal business, Andersson said.

He forecasts that 15 percent of North America's 1997 newsprint capacity will be superfluous within four years as electronic newspapers, fax-on-demand services and online news organizations score gains in the battle for readers.

"The considerable information content of most newspapers, combined with high fixed costs and the subsidizing of content by advertising, makes them particularly vulnerable to electronic substitution," Andersson said.

His report lays much of the blame for this trend at the doorstep of the newspapers themselves. About 200 million pages of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post now are viewed online each month, it states.

By 2003, the report estimates, approxi- mately 15 percent of all U.S. classified ads -will be on the Web.

So can trees breathe easier? Not a chance.

The World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank in Washington, D.C., observed in a recent study that paper is still "the dominant and essential vehicle of modern communications."

Personal computers alone, the institute found, "can account for 115 billion sheets of paper per year worldwide."

This is sweet music to Weyerhaeuser Co. in Tacoma, Wash., the world's biggest lumber producer and manager of timberland.

"It was widely reported that paper would go away and there'd be a paperless society," said Frank Mendizabal, a company spokesman. "That hasn't proved to be the case."