Try to imagine a world without paper. What's left for us? Almost nothing. Paper is with us everywhere. Books, letters, diaries, and also cardboard beer coasters, birth certificates, board games and business cards, photographs, tickets, tea bags. We are people of paper. But the era of paper is coming to an end. Electronic books and tickets are replacing paper ones, and archives are being digitized. We are entering a world without paper, but Ian Sansom talks about this most paradoxical of man-made materials and proves that in one form or another it will always be with us.