Towards a digital lifestyle: Paperless in Denmark

An announcement from KMD, a Danish IT services vendor, shows us another way to dispense with paper mail. The service is called e-boks and it is used by one million people, predominantly in Denmark, a country of 5.2 million inhabitants. (In a presentation at a conference in 1996, I predicted that the internet would be the primary way for government to communicate with their citizens. It looks like it is starting to happen.)

Remote Control Mail, a US based service that I mentioned yesterday, relieves you of paper by having a processing centre receive your mail and imaging it. The nifty thing about e-boks is that e-boks dispenses with paper all together.

The incentives for e-boks users are the promise of less paper mail to organise in binders, an online archive of important documents and the fact that the service is free. It is funded by the senders of mail who can send PDF documents to users at a 75% discount compared to cost of a stamp. So far, some 550 companies, banks, utilities, public councils and other public institutions have signed up to communicate with their customers, employees and citizens in this way.

The e-boks service supports several digital identity systems; all of them based on CPR, a state-run centralised register of personal information. Near ubiquitous use of the state-issued personal identification number makes it easy for the senders to divert paper mail to electronic when they receive updates of new users joining the system (or vice versa if users leave the service).

Tags: KMD e-boks Denmark mail imaging PDF paperless digital lifestyle