E-pubs & overworked printers

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It was suggested that the constant necessity of printing downloaded versions
of e-journal files would argue against moving to electronic publishing.  Why
overwork the printer, it was asked?

Photocopy machines in libraries are already being used constantly to make
copies of articles that people don't own.  There aren't enough out-of-print
articles and books on the market to go around; most new investigators have to
make do with photocopies of the classic paleo works.

Printing downloaded files on a good color printer (neglecting cost for the
moment) in the department or library would actually improve the quality of
most reprints in people's collections.  It would also remove the necessity
for authors to order untold numbers of reprints at $3-$4 a copy.

Somebody with a good scanner and copyright authorizations could even start a
service that makes available out-of-print publications at a cost competitive
with reprinting the whole thing on paper.

We're talking a great deal of storage capacity, here, but I note with
dejection that the $1000 I spent for 20 megabytes in 1986 now buys more than
4 gigabytes of hard drive space.  At that rate, in another 10 years the
hardware folks will have to come up with the next prefix as we push past 800
gigabytes for a well-equipped PC.  800 gigabytes will hold a lot of e-journal
files.

How many, I wonder.  At 50K for the text of a moderate-sized file, 80Kx5 for
five line drawings, and 200Kx20 for photo figures, each taxonomic paper would
require less than 5megs for storage (uncompressed).  That's 200 articles per
gig, 160,000 articles per hard drive (circa AD 2005).  At 100 articles/yr in
a journal, that's 1,600 journals archived each year on your desktop, or 10
years' worth of 160 journals, or 50 years' worth of your favorite 30
journals.

I ignore such advances as 3-D rotational graphics, sound, video, and attached
personal AV commentary by the author, which is all coming down the I-bahn
very quickly.

One last example:  Annual GSA abstracts and programs with the complete
still/video/ audio of all sessions.  With compression, how much storage would
it take?