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The future of print

12 Aug 2009

Print is certainly changing, but it is far from dead. We may have reached the digital age, but those who believe it heralds the paperless society are the ones still working through the 300 cases of bottled water they stockpiled against the Y2K bug.

When people think of print they can’t help thinking of how trees are cut down to make paper. But printing is much more than paper made from trees processed through a printing machine.

For hundreds of years, it has been the staple form of mass communication and for many reasons society in its current form is here because of print.

The industrial revolution was only possible because of the speedy communication of ideas around the world in printed books. Some of the world’s most significant inventions would never have been developed had they not been communicated to others in print. So print has made a huge contribution to mankind as a communication medium and there is still much value in this form of communication today.

And while one of the most traditional printing processes, offset printing, faces a challenge from new digital processes, the changes do not mean the end of a technology that remains one of our society's true landmark developments.

What’s it worth?
According to the US Department of Commerce, the US printing and publishing industry had total sales of US$210 billion in 1997 and has grown since then. Offset printing has long been the workhorse of companies willing to provide services that range from inexpensive, quick turnaround jobs to high end printed products that use special inks, paper stocks, coatings, or other elements.

Closer to home the Australian industry turnover in 2007 was approximately $23 billion, including almost $10.5 billion in industry value added, and the industry’s annual exports totalled more than $500 million with imports more than $2 billion.

The average rate of growth for the Australian printing industry during 2007 was about 1.6%, a modest number compared to previous years, but slightly higher than that of the manufacturing sector at 1.3%.

The Australian direct mail market is worth about $3.5 billion per year so it is clear that printed marketing material is a major competitor to mainstream media for advertising revenue.

According to the American Direct Marketing Association, direct mail is the fastest growing form of advertising other than the Internet and is projected to boost sales growth in the US by 5.3% until 2012. By comparison, television advertising is projected to drive sales growth by 5%, magazines by 3% and newspapers by 1% over the same period.

Print, advertising and Web 2.0
A perception of some people is that the Internet is making print advertising obsolete.

The personal computer has become a household necessity and most homes in the developed world have more than one computer. Business cannot function without ever-growing IT resources, and now with the iPhone and Blackberries, we have the Internet at our fingertips, wherever we are.

Facebook has changed the way we network and interact with each other. Skype has changed the way we talk to each other. MP3s have changed how we purchase (or not) and listen to music. Online stores have changed how we buy
all sorts of stuff.

So the Internet has impacted on our lives, but is it is not making print advertising obsolete. Have you really changed the way you interact with people and make purchases, or has the Internet just created an additional tool to enhance the way you already interact and make purchases?

The original method of advertising in the past was word of mouth with signs and pictures. Then came the printing press and that changed how information was spread. Then the radio was invented and once again this changed how information was spread. Then came the television and the spread of information changed yet again. Then the computer was invented and the personal computer was developed, promising an end to the necessity for paper. Lastly, the Internet was developed and for the last 20 or so years has evolved into what it is today.

The printing press did not make sign advertising obsolete. The radio did not make sign and print advertising obsolete, nor did television make sign, print and radio advertising obsolete. The biggest myth, of course, is that the computer has decreased the amount of paper being used. The facts remain that today advertising can be found on signs, print, radio, and television. Now we don't have a crystal ball, but history has proven time and time again that new types of media only add to our options.

Literacy
Well know industry identity and academic, Phillip Lawrence of Eco Strategies believes that the shift in communication to an online world is also responsible for a decline in standards of literacy.

Before the last Federal election, Kevin Rudd held up a laptop computer and said that every secondary school student would have access to a laptop computer if his government was elected. However, research shows that children cannot learn from computers. In fact, in 2007, the New South Wales HSC English curriculum teachers banned computers from the classroom and their course, because they said computers were in no way a replacement for books and had resulted in new students producing second class work.

A report from the Royal Economic Society in London in 2008 revealed that, in a study of 100 000 students in 31 countries around the world, learning from computers in fact made students dumber.

In another recent report, handheld games designed to keep the human mind active in fact had quite the opposite effect when used for any extended length of time. However, the results for reading a book or doing a crossword were far more effective.

Academic research shows that shifting away from printing undermines literacy standards of the community. An OECD
report released in early 2008 identified that literacy rates in Australia and New Zealand had declined significantly since the early 90s. In 2007, a group of 500 English authors petitioned the UK Government for an investigation into why English young adults had declined significantly in their literacy rates from the early 1990s. Perhaps it was because the Internet started to take hold in the early 90s!

Academics and educators know that printing as a form of communication delivers information in a linear form. The
reader develops the story in their mind as they progressively take it in from the written words, at their own speed. When this is done, the reader is able to construct complex concepts and can make decisions and understand why those decisions have to be made and what the consequences are.

But, in the case of multimedia, information is fed to the viewer or reader in an omnidirectional fashion. This means that information is coming to the reader at different rates and in an order not controlled by the author. In this case, the reader is able to jump quickly to a conclusion and make a decision rapidly. However, they don’t have the benefit of the complex concept being understood and therefore cannot comprehend the significance of any consequences.

In fact the information that is presented on a printed page is far more easily learnt than information displayed on any other media. What this all means is that printing has much more to offer than the fact that you can sit in bed and read a book. Printing as a communication method is completely different to other forms of mass communication and is the foundation of human literacy.

Books
Print technology enabled ideas to be spread in the pages of books instead of via village oral culture. It redefined the audience for literature by transforming it from a small group of manuscript readers or listeners to the masses, who bought books to read in the privacy of their homes.

Technology such as television, radio, film, the 24 hour news cycle and now the Internet have taken us back to oral culture, where we experience the world as a community instead of individually as it has been since Gutenberg's gift of mass literacy and its civilisation-building results.

There have been two technological revolutions that have shaped western civilisation as it is today. Gutenberg's press in the fifteenth century taught people to think in straight lines and the visual order of the printed page, and electricity in the nineteenth century made possible the telephone, television and computers, which taught people to envision many ideas at the same time.

Does the future hold a world without books as we know them? Even though conceptually in the 21st century we view the world and its information more like cyberspace than a book, we still are very much a civilisation based on ‘the book’.

The power of print
There will always be a need for print. Something tangible you can put in a consumer's hand is often priceless. But it is clear that more and more companies will get choosier about what they decide to print versus what they choose to do electronically.

Try curling up with a good computer screen. It just isn’t going to happen. People love the tangible, they enjoy the feel of turning the page with their fingers, they value the immediacy of being able to pick up and put down a book. The curled, dogeared texture of a well-read book brings them a sense of belonging and value.

Print is physical, and has potency you’d be foolish not to acknowledge: pictures that live outside a screen, copy you can carry with you and leave behind, glossy magazines with pretty pictures of things you want sitting there next to you on the coffee table.

What’s really changing is the role of content itself.

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