Today I'm going to take a risk.

I'm going to predict the elimination of several jobs at this and other newspapers around the country within the next 15 years.

It may happen sooner or later than 15 years, but I predict that eventually, the word newspaper will be a misnomer.

The reason: newspapers will no longer be printed on paper, which will eliminate the need for the army of people devoted to the printing and delivery of this newspaper.

The junior high school student who braves the snow and rain six days a week to bring the paper to your doorstep will be doing something else with his or her afternoons, as will the van drivers who drop off their bundles. The polite voices who answer our phones when your paper is late, or wet, or is not delivered will be answering other calls.

The printing press may not disappear completely, but its staff and the massive machine that prints, cuts and folds some 6.5 million copies of the newspaper every year will see their workloads decrease significantly.

Each week, a truck delivers 54 rolls of newsprint to our warehouse. Each 370-pound roll is about seven miles long, which means that a weekly newsprint delivery unrolled and laid end-to-end would reach from Pocatello to Cedar City, Utah.

That's a lot of paper. A lot of increasingly expensive paper, which is both difficult and expensive to transport, when compared to bits, the basic units of digitized information.

Transporting paper requires external vehicles like trucks, delivery services, and your neighborhood newspaper carrier.

Bits travel at the speed of light. They don't get wet. They don't stain your fingers with ink. They need only networks of computers to transport them. They are easy to store for later retrieval. They don't accumulate in a pile waiting to be recycled.

But that doesn't mean newspapers will cease to exist. I once e-mailed Nicholas Negroponte, the columnist for Wired Magazine, to ask if print journalism has any future.

He sent a two-sentence reply: "Journalism is not going to go anywhere. It's just that paper may go away."

Someday in the near future, you'll be reading this newspaper, and probably parts of many others, on a small computer, about the size and weight of the legal pad I used to write the first draft of this column. I've always envisioned this pad as a go-everywhere satellite of the personal computer. You may already consider your laptop PC as a satellite of your home or office, PC. But how many times have you wanted to read a World Wide Web page or a book on CD-ROM from your laptop while in bed late at night, at the dinner table, or in the john?

Secondly, this pad can be configured to remember what you like to read, making it considerably smarter than the daily newspaper is now. Ask yourself: how many articles printed in this paper do you read from beginning to end? If you're like me, you scan the headlines, looking for something that interests you.

Then imagine a collection of articles gathered from a variety of newspapers, wire services, or magazines, which are geared specifically toward your business, hobbies, entertainment interests or other personal needs. You would not be subscribing to just The Idaho State Journal nor just the New York Times. Your computer could scan the headlines for you, picking out what you like based on your set of preferences. You would be subscribing to what many futurists have started calling "The Daily Me."

Many newspapers, including this one, have realized that the future lies in electronic publishing and are already wrestling with the idea of putting their content on the Web, and a significant number of them have already done so with mixed results.

The undisputed leader of the pack is the San Jose Mercury News, which has operated its Mercury Center Web site longer than most other newspapers have even known about the existence of the Web. My other favorites include The New York Times (www.nytimes.com), the Lewiston, Id. Morning Tribune (www.lmtribune.com) and Nando Net (www2.nando.net).

Despite the potential number of readers they can reach, most of these newspaper Web sites have yet to break even by generating advertising revenue, let alone make a profit. The simple reason is that a computer is not yet as portable as a newspaper or book.

But the economics of the publishing world are driving the industry to take a serious look at finding ways to digitize the words we like to curl up with, and to develop both the infrastructure to deliver those bits, and a consumer-friendly device with which to read them.

There are now more people on this planet publishing on paper than ever before, driving up the demand for paper, depleting the supply and increasing the cost.

Ironically, the final result will be the biggest change in the history of the written word since it moved from wet clay tablets to papyrus and paper.

Arik Hesseldahl covers business and technology for the Idaho State Journal. Please send suggestions and comments (no clay tablets, please) to ahess@nicoh.com or ISJREP@aol.com. "Through the Keyboard" also appears on the World Wide Web at http://www.nicoh.com/cyberkol/.

This column appears courtesy The Idaho State Journal and NICOH Net, Inc.