RSS
Click for full-size image Mr. Uhlik . . . has scanned about 100 of his reference books to try to make his home library digital and searchable. Because he wants to keep the house nearly paper-free, most of his remaining 1,000 books are in a shed. He occasionally pays his children to help scan them.
—New York Times, February 10, 2008
I've gone paperless. First I bought that expensive, superfast scanner that all the productivity blogs are raving about; you can feed documents into it by the fistful. Then I bought that expensive software program that converts all those scanned documents into PDF files, runs some optical character-recognition magic on them, and digitally archives every word in a massively searchable, artificially intelligent database. How cool is that?
I started with the usual stuff: tax documents, phone bills, that box of birthday cards from my long-dead grandmother. I emptied file drawers, overturned filing cabinets, input the bathroom-reading bin. Whole bookshelves disappeared -- all those tricky postmodernists, the volumes of Proust I never finished, the unread volumes of writers writing about reading Proust. Cookbooks, composting guides, espresso-maker manual.
At first my children protested when I sliced up their favorite books and scanned them. "Dada, Dada" they said, and flapped their little arms as if to say, "How do we pat the bunny now? Where's Waldo?" But they came around, once I started paying them to help. Hey, they were tearing out the pages anyway.
As a writer, I was paid to produce paper. Now I capture it: liquor store receipts, Staples discount coupons, magazine subscription renewal cards. After scanning, I shred everything, then scan the shreds for backup. With all the daisy-chained hard drives and the mounting electricity bills, the paperless life isn't cheap. But I'm helping the environment. My carbon footprint is so reduced, it's like I have no feet.
Oh, yes, money: I digitized that too. That was a challenge, especially the jars of change, but thanks to that amazing and expensive USB coins-to-PDF converter, I am now both physically and virtually penniless. Unaccountably, the deli guy refuses to let me pay for my coffee with a PDF'ed dollar bill I send via e-mail. Increasingly I restrict my purchases to whatever I can buy at Starbucks through my iPhone or whichever non-paper products Amazon will deliver to my shed.
Which I won't need much longer. In addition to scanning every photo and video of my family, friends, neighbors, and neighbors' friends, I've scanned and imported the vinyl siding, the lawn mower, my fly reel, and a landfill's worth of empty Evian bottles. I hear that the next generation of scanners will be able to tackle toothpaste, wood splinters, and unironed shirts. Surely, living cells are but a digital leap away.
For a while my wife complained that we never saw each other anymore. I remember this because I captured our Skype calls digitally and converted them to text files; I still read them sometimes on my way to the recycle bin to drop off another load of digitized brown paper grocery bags. I love text files. You can view them with a concordance, a software app that takes the most common words in a file and lists them alphabetically, showing the most popular words in larger type, as if for emphasis. I'd offer an example, but my editor reminds me that this is a family periodical.
It used to be that we were judged by the stuff we created and left behind. Who needs that? The hour of transcendence is approaching. Soon, all of me will be online: keyworded, smart-foldered, massively searchable by . . . somebody, maybe. (Hey, just by scanning this, you're helping out. Thanks!) If I'm lucky and can attract enough hits, I might persist for a while as floating text fragments, a drifter on the tag clouds of digg.com and delicious.com. For now, all that separates me from oblivion is a surge protector and my Mozy account-and my money's no good there anymore. Brother, can you spare a gigabyte of remote-server storage?
Share
