Most believe U.S. won't become fully paperless

Only 20% of 1,142 polled believe U.S. will one day be a paperless society

More than half of all Americans believe that paper is forever, according to a poll of 1,142 registered voters conducted last month by Majority Opinion Research.

The poll, commissioned by research firm Poll Position, found that 56% of Americans don't think the U.S. will ever be a fully paperless society.

Only 20% of those polled indicated that they believe the nation will become all-electronic while 24% were undecided or had no opinion.

The poll results were also broken down by age, race, gender and political affiliation.

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More than half of all Americans believe that paper is forever, according to a poll of 1,142 registered voters conducted last month by Majority Opinion Research.

The poll, commissioned by research firm Poll Position, found that 56% of Americans don't think the U.S. will ever be a fully paperless society.

Only 20% of those polled indicated that they believe the nation will become all-electronic while 24% were undecided or had no opinion.

The poll results were also broken down by age, race, gender and political affiliation.

Far more men (25.4%) than women (15.7%) believe the U.S. will someday be a paperless society, according to the poll.

Not surprisingly, far fewer Americans over age 65 (12.3%) than those under 65 (about 22%) believe the U.S. will one day be a paperless society.

The survey found that more Republicans (22.7%) than Democrats (17.4%) or Independents (20.5%) see an all-electronic society in the future.

Today, according to research firm Gartner, the transformation of physical documents into electronic files that can then be stored in a repository for future look-up is a fast-growing marketplace.

In 2010, the market for enterprise imaging software reached $1 billion market worldwide. The market is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 12.1% and total about $1.8 billion by 2015.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian , or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com .

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