text: **3.4. The price of digitization**
  In practice, public data can be opened at affordable costs, in a useful and easily usable way, only if 
  
  it is in digital format. As a consequence of this fact, demand for Open Data exposes a problem that 
  
  already existed and must be fixed anyway, regardless (again) of openness. Any substantial increase 
  
  of efficiency and reduction of the costs of Public Administrations can only happen when data and 
  
  procedures are digitized. The problem is that such digitization (which, obviously, must happen 
  
  anyway sooner or later) can be very expensive and we are only now starting to really realize how 
  
  much. Actual, material costs are not the worst problem here. Activities like semi-automatic 
  
  scanning of paper documents or typing again their content inside some database, are relatively low, 
  
  one-time expenses that are also very easy to calculate and budget in advance with great precision. 
  
  The real costs are those at the social, cultural, historical and workflow reorganization level. What is 
  
  really difficult, that is expensive in ways that are hard to predict, is to fit inside digital, more or less 
  
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