More Than 1 Billion People Use PDF Viewers

Sites include Adobe.com . Published on April 15th, 2012. Written by Anthony West.

Who doesn’t love the PDF document format; it is one of the most dynamic and flexible ways to share documents and provides a raft of features that make our digital lives that much easy to bundle and send to our friends and colleagues on the other side of the digital divide.

A little study conducted by Nitro PDF (a PDF document viewer manufacturer) has helped to paint a picture of just how widely used and popular the document format is. According to the study, PDF viewers are now the second largest software category after web browsers. This popularity means that a staggering 1 billion people use these viewers.

The fact that a seventh of the world’s population uses PDF viewers means that pretty much everything is touched by the document format. Plane tickets in recent years have taken on the format, so too has bank statements and general contracts. Essentially, PDF is now the world’s standard format for sharing digital information.

This rise of course has led to the question of whether PDF will eventually replace paper. I think not, and here is why. “There is no such thing as a paperless office or a paperless home”, so goes the mantra in most business schools and its true. Whether a document is shared in PDF, .DOC or TXT, there will always be the need to ‘print’. And printing, for the most part will always require some type of physical apparatus—i.e. paper.

What do you think? Will PDF kill off paper? Let us know below.