Browse the e-book

While the paperless office has proved elusive, digital content is mushrooming as firms use PDAs and notebooks to access data

For those of you that remember the multimedia PC craze that swept the industry during the early 1990s, when CD-Rom devices became the standard-issue weapon for the corporate and consumer PC, the concept of the paperless office is not new.

Apart from early teething problems when some users were baffled by the apparent addition of a retractable coffee cup holder on their PCs, the shiny CD was at one stage going to rid offices across the land of paper.

Now, 13 years on, I am starting to agree with some of the wags I've met in the printing industry who like to quip: "We'll only have a paperless office when we have a paperless toilet."

But like most things in the IT industry, the hype seldom lives up to the reality until the technology matures.

While the multimedia PC revolution was perhaps too ambitious in its claims to cut out paper as a communications medium, it did wake people up to the idea of digital content.

Over the past few years this idea has really been taken to another level by vendors such as Adobe with its portable document format (PDF).

As the de facto standard for reading digital content over the internet, via its Acrobat platform, which is now on its sixth iteration, the popularity of digital content in so-called 'e-books' or 'digital editions' is soaring as businesses increasingly use PDAs and notebooks to access digital content.

To this end, Computer Reseller News is pleased to announce the availability of digital content in e-book format, which readers can request via email and download as an enhanced PDF.

Currently we are making our popular How To Sell series available for download, but in the coming months you will be able to download the entire newspaper digitally.

Check out www.crn.vnunet.com to register for electronic editions. There is also a demo version of our digital content available to view from the site.