> Stacks of paper are used because it's not possible to put several pages worth of text onto a single page of paper while maintaining a legible font size.
Right. And trying to replace a stack of paper with one paper sheet-sized screen is a significant downgrade. Which is why tablets are used primarily for entertainment, not for work.
Having lots of sheets of paper you can spread out around you is an advantage, not a limitation, of the paper-based workflow.
No, a single screen is a massive upgrade over using stacks of paper.
People vastly prefer digital dictionaries over paper dictionaries because you can more quickly find stuff. And that’s with dictionaries in alphabetical order.
Stacks of paper suck, there’s some potential utility in a space ship for all the redundancy around independent tablets you can hand someone. That’s something that regularly happens on the show and kind of makes sense, but is more a visual reference for the audience. Which is where stacks of tablets shine, the viewer can easily follow what their doing even if you can’t see the screen.
It can be true that stacks of paper are better than a single screen in some ways and worse in others. Other people like to be able to spread out multiple sheets of paper in front of them, even if you do not. You are correct that digital search is a huge plus of having a digital interface.
If we’re talking 3-5 pieces of one sided paper for say homework you can spread them out nicely, but scale that to multiple stacks of loose paper and it invariably becomes a mess.
Thus, in practice almost everyone is using multiple screens at work when they can even if printing stuff is trivial.