Dead tree edition

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Dead tree edition is a term referring to a printed paper version of an article, as opposed to more modern alternatives such as a web page. It is a mildly deprecating term for hard copy; variations include dead tree format and dead-tree-ware. "Dead tree" refers to trees being cut down for raw material for producing paper.

This example usage comes from The Guardian website on 29 November 2006:

"Maybe this is more a multimedia victory for Jeff Randall himself: he did manage a dead-tree front page, web scoop, vodcast and major plug on the 10 O'clock news."

A related saying among computer aficionados is "You can't grep dead trees", from the Unix command grep meaning to search the contents of text files. This means that an advantage of keeping documents in digital form rather than on paper is that they can be more easily searched for specific contents. An exception are texts stored as digital images (digital facsimile), as they cannot be easily searched, except by sophisticated means such as optical character recognition or examining the infrequently used image metadata.

Related terms include tree carcass for a book and tree-killer for a computer printer. These terms are all examples of dysphemism.