Last gasp of the fax machine.

The article reports on the outlook for fax machines. Stand-alone fax machines have been especially hard-hit due to the popularity of e-mail. Peter Davidson, a fax consultant, says that sales of fax machines worldwide fell from 15m in 2000 to 13m in 2001 and are still falling. He estimates that faxes now account for just 4% of companies' phone bills, down from 13% ten years ago. Americans especially are shedding them fast: by 2006, Mr Davidson predicts, their spending on fax machines will be less than half what it was in 2002. In January, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, fined Fax.com, a marketing company based in California, $5.4m for mass-faxing unsolicited advertisements in violation of a law passed in 1991. Stronger limits on fax marketing, requiring anyone sending an advertising fax to have written permission from the recipient, are due to come into force in January 2005. New technologies and regulations will not kill off faxes just yet. The machines are still helpful for communicating with people in rural areas or poor countries where internet access is spotty. They also transmit signatures: although electronic signatures have been legally binding in America since 2000, hardly anyone actually uses them. Publishers, among the first to embrace fax machines because they sped up the editing process, may be the last to bid them goodbye. Stephen Brough of Profile Books, a London publisher affiliated with The Economist, says that faxes are still useful in transmitting orders to distributors, and in allowing authors to indicate changes on page proofs easily. Because it is such a pain to operate, the fax is generally used with discretion. Faxes also allow lawyers, among others, to have exchanges that they can later shred, without leaving an electronic record.