Use this version. Email this to a friend. Far-out as that may seem, Brinkema acknowledges that there are plenty of drawbacks.
Screens can be hard to read, and even lightweight displays are heavier than paper.
For those who labor in the field of document preservation, dealing with electronic documents is fraught with difficulties. For example, there is the problem of the proliferation of formats, said Brinkema, who is developing an electronic archive for the U.S. Courts. Besides multiple formats for documents, there are multiple versions of most formats, and a given format is not always compatible with the versions that came before or after it, he said. The problem is compounded by the rapid evolution of information technology. Electronic documents may be preserved yet inaccessible because they are in old formats and the software and hardware needed to read them have become unavailable.