Teblog

Hoard or share? Your call.

A long time ago, when I was a wage slave in a computer company, I figured out two things.

1) People will always be around and therefore I should work in a field that involved communication and people. (Teaching and writing became important parts of my life subsequently.)

2) I should, as much as possible, do things once and get paid lots of times. (I subsequently entered the publishing world - magazines first, then software.)

These activities have, to varying degrees, determined the trajectory of my life for the past 33 years. And a jolly fine life it's been, thank you for asking.

But, somewhere along the way, things changed. I found myself giving more and more of my stuff away. I (wrongly) bombed the price of my niche software too far. I found myself cheerfully handing out information and opportunity leads to others. At some point I moved from hoarding and dribbling out my knowledge in exchange for largish sums of money to giving away more and receiving something else in return, friendships and business relationships based on trust and transparency.

I'm not totally stupid, I realise I have to sell something and that something tends to be what's between my ears, my native talents or what I can lay my hands on and package more skilfully than others. It makes for a good life in which all the bits join up rather harmoniously. People, fortunately, know about me and are happy to pay me when they think they can get some value out of me.

I was prompted to write this by a tiny, three-minute, interview conducted in a noisy restaurant by one Suw Charman. She, incidentally, was partly responsible - along with Adriana Lukas and Jackie Danicki - for acting as midwives as I entered the world of blogging at the end of 2004. Her interview was with JP Rangaswami, a man who is a paragon of knowledge sharing. He gets hardly any sleep so has a ton of time to do his job (a very important one at BT), to keep up, to engage with all the 'greats' of the social computing world, and to reflect very deeply on our world, much of which ends up in his blog.

To paraphrase the (short) interview, he pointed out that capturing and keeping knowledge is part of the incentive system in many organisations. But the new generations coming through (and the more enlightened of the older generations) have a more sharing attitude. The core question is: do people want to share? And, by implication, he believes the the answer is, increasingly, "yes". It shows in his behaviour. The benefits show in his reach and influence. And little of this could have happened without him deciding to reach out and share.

And, as I've written many times before, inside an organisation, the benefits are potentially huge. Rangaswami believes that the decision (should we implement social software?) that organisations need to make  is akin to deciding whether or not a company should have a telephone exchange. In time, it will become obvious. Like email and mobile phones before, it will take a while to bite (he thinks the transition could be ten years or more) but it will happen without question.

An unjustified poke at social media

When I was a kid, we used to sneer at the children who scuttled indoors as soon as the evening tv programmes started. (Yes, it was that long ago.) The rest of us had a grand old time playing in the streets, the fields, the woods or going for a bike ride or a swim. Even now, I regard most television output as a waste of time.
But then most people who look at me 'playing' with the computer probably regard that as a waste of time. Little do they realise that the computer is actually a doorway into a world of personally-chosen information and relationships, not to mention local tools for manipulating words, numbers and images. One thing I never do is play computer games. As an ex-programmer, I find the idea of pitching my wits against another programmer a bit of a pointless exercise.
Just lately, Twitter and other social sites have come in for increasing amounts of stick, a lot of it from journalists who assume that the public can't tell the difference between responsible and irresponsible blogging. Or, just this week, the journalists who have reported that Twitter can make us 'immoral'. This is tosh at two levels. First of all, it's a misinterpretation (by the Daily Mail in one particular case) of what was actually said by the researchers into the subject. Second of all, it's loading Twitter with problems that started with television at least, and possibly radio before that.
Mind you, the researchers'publicists have themselves to blame. The story announcement, from the University of Southern California, had a sub-title that read, 'Tweet this: Rapid-fire media may confuse your moral compass.' The fundamental idea is that when information and images are coming at us thick and fast, our poor brains don't get enough time to reflect on what we're seeing. Apparently we need between six and eight seconds for emotions relating to our moral senses to awaken in our minds. By that time, especially with quick-fire media, the moment has passed and the appropriate emotions fail to surface as the next story grabs our attention.
The study raises questions about, "the emotional cost - particularly for the developing brain - of heavy reliance on a rapid stream of news snippets obtained through television, online feeds or social networks such as Twitter." You can't help feeling that last item was chucked in as a news hook. After all, you're unlikely to encounter a lot of emotion-laden content in a 140-character Twitter tweet.
Of the list, television news is probably the biggest culprit. And who sits in front of that all their waking hours? Most of us spend the majority of our time engaged in other activities which give us time for reflection, if we need it. And we spend a fair bit of time, especially if we're in the vulnerable mind-developing group, playing with our chums or hanging out with the family and learning about life and compassion in these inherently slower activities.
It strikes me that the anti-Twitter venom which was generated by this story would have been better aimed at television producers and shoot-em-up games writers.
The study, if you're interested, comes out next week at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences http://www.pnas.org/content/early/recent. It will be called, "Neural Correlates of Admiration and Compassion."

Lotusphere mop-up; then I'll shut up

Rather than write a series of blog posts of ever-diminishing interest (for me and for you), I thought a final Lotusphere round up would make sense.

First up, Doug Heintzman. He's the director of Lotus Strategy. We talked about the market for collaboration software, top to bottom. I mentioned the bottom  last week. But, at the top, he talked about the Enterprise Adaptability practice: something that materialised after the last Lotusphere. The most interesting bit, for me, was the toolkit that it provides its practitioners for studying the social networking patterns in enterprise and using it to help build an ROI case. I asked him what parameters were measured, hoping to get a checklist for you, and was rewarded with a verbal finger wag. Something to do with the huge intellectual property value in the patterns that emerge. Drat and double drat. If you're interested in learning more, start here.

Okay. I've given up trying to find the next thing online. It was a brilliant use of the 'Crocodile Dundee in New York' scene where Dundee has headed for the subway to get out of Sue's life. She's dumped her fiancé and wants Dundee. The scene is the one in the subway where she wants to get a message to Dundee that she wants him back. Verbal messages are transmitted up and down the crowded platform until he clambers over the heads of the passengers for a reunion. Aaaah. You can see the clip on YouTube, but it hasn't got the IBM punchline. I tell you, if that's a real ad', aimed at real people, IBM/Lotus has hit a hole in one. Sean Poulley, the host of the session claimed that the nine collaborative tools being offered will be "competitively priced with meeting-only services". Interesting.

I'd wager that Casey Dugan was the most enthusiastic person at the event. She was showing off Beehive - a social networking site where people can reveal stuff about their personal lives as well as maintain professional connections. It has 50,000 users inside IBM so it is clearly of value to this substantial minority. It lives behind the firewall, which is less risky than public services. It's still a research project at the moment but you can grab more details here.

I think that's enough for one year about Lotusphere, except to say that some things made me unhappy. My Linux/Firefox  netbook wouldn't render my agenda properly. And I'd have liked a single sign on to the three different IBM services I was trying to use: the analyst site, the LotusLive site and the Lotusphere site. And, as for responsiveness, getting hundreds, maybe thousands of people trying to hit the access points and networks at the same time was a recipe for disaster. I gave up early and took to wandering round carrying bits of paper and having face-to-face conversations with real live people. Much more fun.

Now I'm taking a break. See you in a few weeks.

The organisational social software paradox

Last week I reported on the shape of the enterprise social networking space with the help of Andrew McAfee's Berkmann Centre lunchtime presentation on the subject. This week I'll get a little closer to home and present you with a paradox you're going to have to resolve if you're thinking of introducing social networking into your organisation.

A few months ago, Freeform Dynamics and MWD joined forces to carry out research among 201 companies on the subject of collaborative computing. The respondents were roughly equally split between France, Germany and the UK. All organisations were at least 1000 employees and half of them were over 5000. Sixty percent of the respondents were IT-centric and forty percent business-centric. All had some responsibility for workforce communication and collaboration.

The research contained all manner of interesting stuff but, as promised last week, I'm going to take a couple of charts out which relate to risk. One of our questions centred around the unofficial use of collaboration software within the organisation. As you can see from the chart below, social software of the kind we were discussing last week has crept into most of these organisations to some degree. Over fifty percent of respondents report wide adoption while almost every organisation has at least some.

In the officially sanctioned figures (not shown), social media is in third place at a little under 25% but instant messaging remains bottom of the heap.

Now, I don't know if I'm being dim here, but if something is unsanctioned, it seems that people would need to get it in by stealth. This is easy enough to do with solo desktop software (if organisational desktop control is lax enough) but social media, by its very nature, needs more than one participant and a shared location in which participants can 'meet', either synchronously or asynchronously.

This being the case, it seems highly likely that at least a percentage of those interviewed must be using public services in order to achieve their social networking objectives. Some, of course, will have an in-house 'skunk works' server - rather as Euan Semple did when he was at the BBC - but this requires some degree of computer skill and, of course the authorisation of the IT department at least.

So, let's take a look at the second chart. This relates to the concerns of the respondents towards the use of public services for this sort of thing. Don't forget it includes the conferencing, communication and screen sharing applications mentioned in the first chart.

Security, compliance, user distraction and support overhead all rank reasonably highly when you aggregate 'major concern' and 'some concern'.

We clearly have a discrepancy between what people are doing and what their organisations would like them to be doing. No doubt the employees have their reasons for behaving in this contradictory way. I'd hazard a guess that they've found the perceived benefits outweigh the perceived risks. Within most organisations, I'd have thought it unlikely that people would adopt social software just so they can chat to their personal friends. (By the way, if you'd like to alarm yourself with a detailed run down of risks, take a look at this new report on Web 2.0 security from the European Network and Information Security Agency.)

I'll confess to a degree of bafflement and, if you are in one of these contradictory situations, I'd love to hear from you. Perhaps you can tell me whether things are as laissez faire as they appear or whether guidelines and controls have been put in place to minimise, or at least balance, risk. And, maybe, tell us how hard it is for your organisation to take social networking seriously and what efforts you're making to articulate the commercial benefits to the powers that be.

I look forward to hearing from you.

What if the lights go out?

We humans have a talent for getting other people and other things to do stuff for us. If we didn't, we'd all be out there scratching a living from the forests and fields and we'd have a pretty rudimentary existence. Would you care to forage or kill for the food on your table?

"A strange way to start an IT-focused blog," you might be thinking, but all will become clear. Yesterday I was listening to Clay Shirky talking about the wonders wrought by the advent of the internet. In particular, he was talking about the tremendous communication leap which has taken place in terms of how we communicate, cooperate, collaborate and act in concert as a result.

Previous communication systems have been predominantly one on one - telegraph, telephone, fax and so on - or they've been one to many, where 'one' has usually been a business: books, radio, television. Even the web started off that way. What's changed over the past few years is our willingness and ability to convene online. We don't need to be gathered together by an organisation - a company, a fan club, or whatever. We do it ourselves. And we're most likely to do it by coalescing around a topic of common interest.

Shirky mentioned the case of HSBC stopping its interest-free overdraft facility for graduates last year. It thought it had the power to do this. (One to many.) But it didn't account for a graduate starting a Facebook group delicately called "Stop The Great HSBC Graduate Rip-Off". Okay, I was kidding about the 'delicate'. Despite it being the summer holiday period, students and graduates joined the group in their thousands to discuss the issue and decide on actions that might need to be taken. Not least sharing information about how to move their accounts to other banks. Newspapers picked up on it. Physical demonstrations were planned in Facebook and HSBC backed off.

A piece of information about HSBC became a gathering point, a cooperation point and a collaborative action point. This sort of thing just couldn't have happened before. People were put together by bosses. Or they joined clubs organised by other people. They didn't self select and self organise, certainly not as quickly and as effectively and in such numbers.

Inside the business, the same thing's happening. People often find each other because of common interest and quite regardless of the hierarchy. If two people in two labs in two parts of the world are coincidentally researching the same materials, there's a good chance that they'll discover each other if there's a topic online around that material. Relationships will form which couldn't have come about through central direction.

As Shirky says, "Every URL is a latent community."

You see it a lot with environmental groups at the moment. A lot of coalescing is going on around different green topics. I see that fellow analyst Tom Raftery has started talking about the 'Tom' instead of the Tonne as a CO2 measure. In fact Gavin Starks has started a ning social network called megatom. It has 15 members as I write and it may be madly successful, or it may die. It cost very little to start. It's not like a conventional media title. If it flies, it flies. If it doesn't, it doesn't. This kind of exercise is being repeated thousands of times a day, all over the world. Some might say the lunatics are in charge of the asylum, but that's not true. Good ideas will gain traction, bad ones won't. Good contributors will gain influence, bad ones will be ignored.

With several UK power stations heading for the knacker's yard courtesy of EU rulings and with our excessive dependence on foreign energy supplies, we face the real prospect of power shortages. But this new world relies, more than anything else, on us each having a supply of electricity. Without it, the doorways to this parallel social universe will be slammed shut.

Am I being paranoid? Does it matter? I happen to think "no" and "yes" respectively. What about you?

Collaboration: the old way. Why not?

Just lately I've been wondering a lot about stimulating innovation inside companies. It was sparked off by a visit to the Imaginatik user conference in London. I was treated to a number of case studies in which customers saved themselves tens of millions of dollars by adopting Imaginatik's IdeaCentral approach to collaborative problem solving.

The companies were large - Walmart, Whirlpool and Pfizer, to name a few - who were saving tens of millions of dollars as a result. Imaginatik likes to promote a ten times ROI at every opportunity, which suggests that the cost of the software and services are probably beyond the reach of smaller businesses anyway.

So this got me wondering. Given that a lot of IdeaCentral is similar (on the surface at least) to social software, could cheaper and more generally available tools be used to similar effect? It is web-based. It has places to post your ideas, comment on other people's, add your profile, make contact, get notifications of updates, voting mechanisms, tagging, search and automatic discovery of similar ideas. Behind the scenes, the set-up and management software and a bunch of add-on modules contribute to this powerful software suite.

Could the bulk of this be done easily using social tools like blogs, wikis, Twitter and suchlike? I'm not sure. While I like these tools and am an active participant in the social computing world, I'm not sure that most people would be ready for an unstructured collection of tools. It would be simply too complicated for the average user to start blogging, commenting, tagging, voting and the like. The management tools are the other side of the coin. It would be difficult, but probably not impossible, to put together some kind system to keep track of everything that's going on.

I'm now going to suggest something retrograde which might have my social software pals throwing their hands up in horror. What about using a forum? It's simple to set up, simple to use and you can easily control membership. (I ran a public forum and the spam levels were absolutely ridiculous.) You can also keep the captured knowledge on your own system, usually in a MySQL database which makes for ready integration with other systems.

Users can start new topics, others can comment. They can search. They can be notified of comments. A good clue about value is whether a suggestion has comments. Because it's being implemented in a business context, so there's no personal or business advantage in flaming or being silly. Once an idea has collected a few comments, perhaps the management could move it up the list to give it more prominence. (Or maybe some forum software exists to do this automatically, I don't know.)

For smaller organisations, I would have thought that this would be an simple way to collaborate and it would be a pity if it were to be sidelined by the more shiny toys of recent years.

Of course, I could be talking through my hat. What do you think?

Adobe Genesis addresses real needs

Breaking ranks with the 'browser-only' brigade, Adobe is planning to introduces a desktop client to integrate the worlds of web and enterprise applications. Code-named Genesis, it was given its first public airing at last week's Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Private pilot trials will be up for grabs in October.

With Genesis, users are able to create workspaces which contain related clusters of applications and data. For example, for sales, they might have a collection of applications already open for each prospect - business intelligence, company information, relevant web pages, sales history, brochures, contracts and so on.

The user creates workspaces by dragging and dropping 'tiles' for the the relevant applications and documents from catalogues straight into the workspace. These catalogues can be public, published by anyone, but typically software publishers and aggregators. Or they can be private, created by the IT department. Tiles include web browsers and a file repository. The company is working on a viewing mechanism which displays file contents without the need to open the application.

Once the workspace is assembled, the user logs in to each application and navigates to where they need to be. The state of open applications persists so that the next time they return to a folder everything is exactly as they left it.

The Genesis desktop software will be free of charge. Users can create workspaces and just get on with this new way of working. Although targeted at enterprise customers, there's nothing to stop individuals using it.

But, it's likely that they'll want to share information with others and this is where the money comes in. Adobe will run a SaaS collaboration service. Teams can subscribe or the organisation can subscribe. In the first case, it's a credit card arrangement with the users determining who belongs and what permissions they're given. In the second case, it's more closely integrated with the corporate directory system. Outsiders, such as business partners, can also be included.

Workspaces can be shared with others, but their access to applications will depend on their own authorisation level. If they are allowed to update application data, this is reflected to all subscribed users. The system has a locking and check-in system to prevent clashes.

In the first instance, Adobe is pushing the value of the system to sales and legal teams in the 'deal room' environment where projects are on fairly long time-scales. As time goes by, additional people are brought into the team and the workspace enables them to get up to speed and access much of what they need to do their work, whether they're support engineers, lawyers or finance folk. One nice touch is that tiles can intercommunicate - a tweak of a graphic can change the underlying information in the provisioning application, for example.

Once signed up to the collaboration service, things like presence indicators, IM, videoconferencing, screen-sharing and whiteboarding become available. Whiteboard sessions can be saved as workspace tiles for future reference. The instant messaging is based on XMPP which means that chat can take place with users on other IM systems. The SaaS element is restricted to synchronisation and real-time collaboration, which means that all workfiles are available to users when they're offline.

It will be a long time, if ever, before all applications live in the cloud and are delivered to the browser. In the meantime, we will be living in a mixed world of enterprise, desktop and cloud applications. With Genesis, Adobe promises to integrate the three worlds, plus collaboration, into a desktop that reflects its classy values when it comes to user interface design.

If you want to put your organisation up for a trial, write to Matthias Zeller at Adobe.com. His email name is matzeller. He was the man that gave the presentation at Office 2.0.

Office 2.0 unconference

Went to an unconference today. For those unfamiliar with the term, it's based on the assumption that the folks in the audience often know more than those on the platform. So why not invert the normal process and let the audience join in?

As you might expect, it wasn't an unqualified success because the usual mix of humanity was there. Shy people, knowledgeable people, egotistical people, idealists, evangelists and sheep. No names, no pack drill. But, given that the day started with a blank sheet, it ended up providing some useful and relevant insights to the attendees.

It cost next to nothing to attend ($50) but, of course, it did cost people's time. Given that the day included plenty of opportunity for networking and a drinks/nibbles party at the end, you'd have to be really hard-hearted to say it was a waste of time.

The event as a whole is called Office 2.0 and this is the third time it's run. Judging from peoples' interests at the unconference, 'Enterprise' was the highest ranked topic. "Thank goodness," thought I, because that's what I'd come for.

I learnt a bit, maybe a lot. One person was on the verge of buying a collaboration system when she was introduced to WordFrame. In fact, the vendor she was about to sign up with sent a review which happened, in passing, to mention this competitor. She made the necessary call and knew within a very short time that WordFrame far outstripped the alternative. And she knew this because she had prepared a massive specification of her requirements. And this is the point. These social software SaaS tools might appear to be low cost, but that's not a good reason to shirk on specifying what you need.

Another thing that came out of real experiences was that antipathy towards social tools is not a generational or an age thing. It is an attitudinal one. Again, this may seem obvious but, in all the yakking about millennials and generation Y, it's easy to lose sight of this fundamental truth.

When it comes to participation, the Jakob Nielsen rule applies. one percent of participants are heavy contributors, nine percent are intermittent and the remainder are lurkers. A lot of people try to crank up the contribution levels of the lurkers. But that's actually the last thing you want to do. Accept that people lurk. They will usually de-lurk when they have something of value to say.

Next week, I'll give a more complete debrief on the conference as a whole.

Putting email in its place

A very brave chap I know, called Luis Suarez, has dared to challenge his company's predilection for email. Email was used for everything. File sharing and editing, appointment bookings, conversations, seeking help, status reporting... Whatever the question, email was the answer. Everyone used it. It must be right.

Hmmm. Sometimes 'received wisdom' is absolutely not right. At least not for all circumstances. Have you tried group editing a Word document? It's fine in theory with the Track Changes and all. But it breaks down the moment more than two people are involved. And, even then, it breaks down unless responsibility is handed over with each exchange of the document.

This is why the wiki came about. It allows people to pitch in at their convenience and maintains a decent version history to boot. Word could still be used for final polishing but, for getting the content right, wikis take some beating. They also, it has to be said, take some getting used to for people with an email mentality.

We have become so used to the convenience of creating email - whack in a few cc's and a bcc just in case - we forget that it has a dark side. Unless you have very sophisticated filters, emails crave attention. They arrive, loaded with content which has to be scanned, at least.

Compare that with an instant message, a Twitter tweet or an RSS feed. They are all means of communicating. They're fairly unobtrusive, but they can lead to great value. They can be scanned quickly and only those that require attention be acted on. In a group setting, a chat group - such as those that can be set up in Skype - is ideal. First you can see if there's anyone around, then you might ask, "Hey, anyone know who's organising the Office 2.0 conference?" Someone would answer and all the others know they don't have to bother. Compare that with an email asking the same question. If there are nine in the group, that's potentially eight responses - and each of those would probably be cc'ed to the other seven.

Sure, email has its place, but it's a much smaller place than you'd imagine in group work. It's fine for one on one contact and for confidential exchanges, although not always. While writing this, I've heard from Luis via Skype and Twitter - little things - exchanges of information, planning a visit. Nothing much, not worth an email, but it helped us move two other discussions forward (one on debating behaviour, another on mind-mapping) at a minuscule time cost.

Of course, group collaboration isn't for everyone. It requires an openness, a transparency and a potential exposure that makes some exceedingly nervous. But group working, especially across disciplines and between insiders and outsiders (customer, suppliers) is becoming a vital part of business these days. The firewall isn't going to disappear, but it's certainly shimmering at the edges as insiders and outsiders exploit social media for mutual benefit.

I'm still troubled by the thought that I can't easily find stuff that I know is lying around somehere in all these different pools of information. But that's maybe a problem with the way my life is (dis)organised. And, anyway, I find that the change to my grey matter has so much more value than the actual stored words.

I have to take my hat off to Luis Suarez' achievements: during the past six months, he's dropped the number of emails per day from 30-45 per day to 22-30 per week. And he's achieved this within the confines of a large organisation. Okay, his job title is 'Knowledge Manager, Community Builder and Social Computing Evangelist' and he has a good reason for promoting these ideas. But he's not from some fluffy social computing startup. He works for IBM.

A desirable and practical digital book?

Nothing is more satisfying, nor more wasteful of resources, than printing out some of the pdfs that land on my digital mat. Yet, if I'm to work on a train, I'll quite often set the printer going while I hop in the shower. There's no way I'm going to sit on the train with a laptop, squinting through the reflections, worrying about battery life and the remote possibility of being mugged. Remote because my laptop is definitely not at the sexy end of the spectrum.

Guilt-filled train trips are part of my life. Yet, I could change things at a stroke were I prepared to fork out a couple of hundred quid for a Sony PRS-505 electronic book reader when it hits the shelves - allegedly in September. Users of the existing model can upgrade their software from Sony and have the pleasure today. By the way, Macintosh users are out of luck, it only couples to Windows PCs

The new machine can hold the equivalent of 160 books. Many more if you add a memory stick or SD card. The device uses digital ink which is bi-stable and requires no energy to retain its state. Sony reckons you can turn 6,800 pages on a single charge. The screen is reflective, rather than back-lit, so can be read in normal book-reading conditions. The device is thinner and shorter than a paperback, but about the same width. The reading area is six inches diagonal with a display resolution of 170 pixels per inch showing eight levels of grey. Controls range along the bottom and down the right hand side and it comes in a tan leather-look cover. Very nice.

After a few false starts with copy protection schemes and lock-in to Sony formats, the company has announced that it now supports a variety of publishing standards: EPUB, BBeB, Adobe PDF, Word, txt, rtf, jpeg, gif, png, bmp and, for audio, MP3 and AAC. Both secured and unsecured formats are handled properly.

Most business readers are going to be very happy with the idea of reading native Word and pdf documents and, perhaps, playing their favourite music while reading. And, apparently, text-based Adobe documents can be reflowed to render them more readable. If, as I suspect, this means no more stupid columns of text then I will be thrilled beyond measure. Pictures get pushed to the end of the text, apparently, so it rather depends on the document whether you'd actually want to reflow. (Scientific papers and, probably, research reports would fall into this category.)

Noticing that Adobe Digital Editions is needed for getting Adobe eBooks onto the device, I installed a copy and what I saw pleased me very much. I could create libraries and folders and bookmark documents, as well as read them without any browser clutter. And, importantly for me, I could still select and copy text to the clipboard. (From whence it is collected by some software that I publish as a mad hobby - I'm not here to promote it, so no names and no links.) Digital Editions is now my PDF reader of choice on the PC. All the PDFs I need are now instantly on tap in the library - complete with mini preview icons. And they're ready for transferring to the PRS-505, assuming I take the plunge.

I'm sure there's a huge environmental angle to all this. The device is a low consumer of energy. My printer would become more or less redundant. All those pdfs can stay in digital form until I lose interest. And, instead of buying printed books, I can get the 'dematerialised' versions instead (yes, I've checked the availability of some favourite authors).

It might take a while to compensate for the embedded environmental cost so it's best to resist getting an upgrade until you've found a genuinely appreciative home for your cast-off, thus extending its life and salving your conscience.