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Writing and reading may be distinctive marks of advanced civilisations but neither the learned scribes of old nor Gutenberg himself could ever have imagined the havoc being wreaked by purveyors of cheap printers. Far from computers paving the way to the paperless office the ubiquitous use of computers in the US and Europe has been accompanied by spiralling paper consumption.

The dream of offices that handled everything electronically may have worked in a very few select companies but for most of us it remains as far into the Elysian ideal as a bottomless bank balance or fuel-free car.

The formerly ebullient optical character recognition (OCR) industry has tumbled into ruins as users have realised that scanning existing documents is a painstaking slog that must be sustained for tens, even hundreds of person-years. Even then full text search will trip over the inevitable uncorrected errors and you will still have to keep all-important original paper documents at considerable cost. For many organisations the only effective answer may be the instant destruction wrought by an arsonist.

Industry leaders like Caere, which once made OCR products for the Mac, have long since outsourced their development to Asia, then downsized, been acquired and eventually seen their former greatness disappear. So we struggle on with more modest survivors such as ReadIris Pro, while those who had been flogging OCR systems seem to have switched to speech recognition before hunting

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for the next high-profit bubble.

Electronic books have been another series of high hopes that have repeatedly been dashed on the rocks. When I visited Akihabara, Tokyo's geek shopping mall, 15 years ago, giants like Sharp were test-marketing electronic book readers. They came to a sticky end but Western PDA manufacturers still had to sink more investors' money into their own mistakes. Although the trade in Adobe Acrobat books has grown steadily, paper literature sales still hugely outnumber those of electronic books.

Amazon could be about to break the mould with the Kindle electronic reader but I doubt if it will succeed. Not only has it chosen to go boldly where so many have failed but it has also ignored many of the lessons. Pure innovation is insufficient for success, while design and usability are central, and there are only so many early adopters who will make initial sales look impressive.

For most of us printed reading material is flexible and convenient. Thanks to paperbacks, I relived the origins of the universe when sheltering from air raids in the Falklands conflict and, when sledging in the Antarctic, lost myself in the Norwegian countryside of Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter. Matching that functionality and breadth of content will be a real challenge for any purveyor.

Another stumbling block is the new approach to copyright that makes buying an electronic book feel like hiring a sunny day, primarily to the benefit of publishers and vendors rather than authors. Some of you will not have paid the cover price of MacUser. Who knows? You could even be in an enlightened and presumably expensive dental surgery. Printed words have few legal restrictions on their loan or resale: much of the charm of books is the ability to buy second-hand or borrow from a friend.

It would be wonderful, not least for countless acres of forest and the future of our planet, if Amazon has struck it right. But for the moment, the Kindle looks like a public prototype in desperate need of a radical rethink and thorough redesign.