I'm fascinated by how people work. The interaction between ourselves and our tools says something about where technology is going, and just as important, about the human factors that shape its course.

I was printing out several news stories I intended to use as background for this column when I realized what that said about high-tech.

At least in this household, the printed page is still a high priority, though deeply enmeshed with digital methods.

I bought the printer I'm currently using in 1993 after the publisher of my first book asked me to send in a complete manuscript on disk and on paper. I'm hard-pressed to think of any piece of digital technology I own that has lasted as long as this Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 4.

Long after publishers have stopped asking for paper manuscripts, I still fire it up every day as I make copies of transactions and print things I find online.

Why print anything at all?

In my case, I've found through trial and error that to use background research, I need to print it and read through it with yellow highlighter in hand, often adding marginal notes. Then when I'm writing, I open the same documents as tabs in my browser, Firefox, where they are available for quick reference. But it's the preparation the night before that helps me make the transition between what I've read and what I'm writing.

I was surprised to see that a major player at HP is still worried about what we used to call the "paperless office."

Vyomesh Joshi has publicly mused that his college-age daughter finds putting things onto paper too burdensome. And at a time when HP's financial outlook is bright, he's wondering whether the attitudes of younger people don't spell trouble for its printer division. I think this is a chimera.

Consider the place paper has in our lives.

I don't have to print out e-mail involving an eBay auction, for example, but I do it because a hard-drive failure might cause me to lose those documents. I could resort to online storage, but when it comes to financial transactions, I want something material.

For the same reason, I print invoices from online purchases as additional proof of the transaction. That is probably unnecessary, but it acts as a double-check against my tendency to lose things.

Surely publishing is going paperless, with authors composing on-screen and sending their work via the Internet for electronic processing?

True enough, yet I find myself editing a book by hand, having to print out the digital document and insert my comments in red ink. This is because of the exasperations of Adobe's PDF format and the need to keep an equation- and illustration-laden document in a form that the publisher is comfortable working with.

And I know other authors who do what I do when they get a manuscript close to being ready. After editing it on-screen until their eyes ache, they print it out for one final run.

You'd be surprised by how many things show up on a printed page that shout out for correction, things that didn't seem notable on the screen. I have no idea why this is, but I muse that it tells us something about the way the mind works as it confronts fixed print on a physical surface.

But if you buy the argument that print is here to stay, then it's clear that some of our digital methods need improvement.

HP's Joshi thinks that Web logs and personal photo galleries might continue to drive the printing business, but if that's the case, Web pages need to have better print options. Printing out a map or a news story often creates a serious mismatch between what you see on the screen and what emerges from the printer.

That's why HP recently bought Tabblo, a company that knows how to fit screen to printed page.

Tabblo (tabblo.com) is all about creating combinations of words and images in stylized templates that can be customized and shared with other users. HP will evidently reshape it to encourage easy formatting and printing of Web-based materials. That would bolster the company's bottom line.

After all, people used to think that the ability to print photographs at home would put photo processors out of business. But the cost of replacement cartridges and the ease of online solutions such as Shutterfly (shutterfly.com) have made it simpler to upload your photos elsewhere for quick handling and return by mail.

If HP can use Tabblo to create a standard output format for Web materials, there's no question in my mind that this will encourage more printing of photographs and text from the Web.

But Google's initiatives in online software and storage notwithstanding, printing is going to continue to flourish, no matter how the Tabblo initiative works out.

Printing is cheap and practical, and keeping copies of physical documents seems to be hard-wired into the human psyche.

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