There was an article some time ago in the New Yorker called 'The Social Life of Paper' which talks about some of the things we can do with printed documents that we can't do with electronic ones. Paper documents take up physical space (so can be searched for and understood in different ways), they can be marked up easily, transferred to anyone, not subject to destructive viruses, trojans and system failure.

In A Manifesto for Collaborative Tools, Eugene Eric Kim begins by telling us that although there are lots of tools for electronic document sharing, the way most people share documents is to email them back and forth to one another. Often in this situation we tend to assume that it's the users--resistance to change or fear or just plain ignorance--that keeps people from adopting the new technology, but, while these are factors, the main reason what appear to be perfectly good applications don't get adopted is because they don't actually do something that most users consider key to the task of sharing and working with documents (or whatever other application is under discussion at the moment).

In addition, Kim says tools can't just be good, they must be tools that do what people want to do, interoperate with each other, and advance the 'conversation' or interactive part of document sharing:

• Be people-centric. This applies both to how we design our tools, and how we market them.
• Be willing to collaborate. We all belong to a community of like-minded tool developers, whether or not we are aware of it. Working together will both strengthen this community and improve our tools.
• Create shared language. Our tools share more similarities than we may think. Conversing with our fellow tool builders will help reveal those similarities; creating a shared language will make those similarities apparent to all. As a shared language evolves, a shared conceptual framework for collaborative tools will emerge, revealing opportunities for improving the interoperability of our tools.
• Keep improving. Improvement is an ongoing process. Introducing new efficiencies will change the way we collaborate, which in turn will create new opportunities to improve our tools.