Print is Dead. Long Live Print. (1)

There is a basic assumption in the imaging industry that people and companies will always print, and that therefore the imaging industry is robust, recession-proof and has a bright future. We generally agree with this optimistic assessment and are great believers that while total print volume will gradually decline, a shift from static/analogue to variable/digital content will ensure that key print segments remain stable and may even grow.

Nonetheless, several recent articles have attracted our attention, all of which somehow bring this assumption into question. First, John Dvorak, the respected IT journalist, commented on the recent decision of PC Magazine to discontinue their print publication and provide only digital content: “The venerable PC Magazine going 100% digital coincides with the trend of media and information distribution doing the same, but further emphasizes the fact that the computer scene, in general, is not interesting enough to sustain a printed magazine.” This observation is astounding - you would never believe that the popular and ever-changing computer industry would run out of content (amount and interest level) to fill a regular publication. He goes on to make his case about the quirks of the PC industry that limit the newsworthy content and publications’ interest in reporting, but still the development is remarkable.

Secondly, Dan Costa in PC Magazine comments on the same decision but also extrapolates to more general social trends: “Trouble is, print publishing is hugely flawed. . . . Print media is simply behind the times by design. Print businesses aren't dead, but they do need to change. Printing should be reserved for archival information—artifacts you'll hold on to for years instead of hours or days.” This observation is also interesting, because we know from several sources that a great amount of corporate printing has a short term character, more as a temporary user interface (case in point: printing and re-printing e-mail and documents for review, sharing, taking notes, etc.) than as an archive. We can expect shifts in usage patterns in the office as well, driven either by economic pressures or by generational tendencies.

Lastly, we read in Media Life that the Detroit media landscape is about to shift radically and may signal similar changes in other metropolitan areas:  “Detroit is one of the last major two-newspaper cities, and soon it will become the first to stop home delivery on all but a handful of days and shift some of its focus to the web, in a major overhaul that highlights just how dire things have become for the nation’s major metropolitan papers.”  An animated (electronic) discussion ensued which debated the wisdom of both papers taking the same step, the questionable logic of trying to keep hard-copy versions going on some but not all days, and the public service aspect of supplying news and information to those citizens who do not have an internet connection.  

Taking our basic digital/variable data sentiment to the extreme, it could conceivably be possible for these publishers to continue their print operations with highly targeted and individualized versions. Add value to justify, or even increase, the selling price and expand circulation: if your neighbor prefers sports in his newspaper and engineering applications in his PC Magazine, he can have that, and you can have the in-depth business and programming coverage that you prefer. The technology is there, but the production and delivery processes would need to be rebuilt. It is presumably easier to go electronic . . .

In fairness to Dan Costa, he did touch on this idea: “Big publishers will continue to scale back on their print operations, but there are millions of micropublishers out there with how-to books, cookbooks, memoirs, even love letters that they can now affordably publish and make available to the world.” Further: “Sure, you say, but those are books. What about magazines, you ask. I would argue that the difference between books and magazines is simply about the publishing schedule, at this point.”

The point is that the world of print will undergo drastic changes, but it is not (yet) possible to predict whether digital print will decline as a result. If millions of micropublishers take up the challenge and implement this approach effectively, OEMs can look forward to attractive business for a long time. But every imaging vendor will have to decide how to address this issue, and this will affect their prospects for future success as well. Stay tuned . . .