Ironies abound in our society. Plastic silverware springs to mind. It is like the reporter who called me up and began the conversation with “Print is dead.” 

“Where did you hear that?” I asked.

“I read it in a newspaper,” he replied.

So following on from last month, here are some more printing ironies:

Yellow Pages online
The onscreen pages are not yellow. In the US, the printed Yellow Pages went to full colour years ago so they print on white paper and then add yellow ink for non colour areas. If fact, if you are an advertiser, they charge you more for white space. Because there is no ink, it should cost less. Yellow directory publishers are killing themselves. There have been few years when the cost of ads went down and they have increased the number of directories for many cities, which requires retailers to spend more money for the same coverage as one directory. The internet directories have maps and links to the retailers’ websites.

Industry mags in electronic form
This one is most ironic. When publications that report on and support our industry give up on print, as some have done, they are confirming the inevitability of shifts in the way we receive and consume information. E-mags are now becoming the norm and some printed pubs have gone totally electronic.

Web-to-print
The internet is both rival and partner of print. Printers promote, inform, and facilitate print using the web. Most files are now FTP’d. (Yes, FTP has become a verb.) Many printers offer multimedia services, including conversion of files to PDFs and screen versions. Thus there is an uneasy alliance between the forces of ‘p’ and the forces of ‘e’.

Government printing office
The United States GPO probably prints less than at any time in its history. Much of the content it processes is either totally or partially electronic. For reasons beyond comprehension, Congress still wants a printed daily Record even though a readable, searchable version is online before the printed versions are bound. The GPO prints limited runs of materials to be stored by the National Archives and the Depository Libraries. This is because the only thing that has survived 230 years of our nation’s history has been printing ink on paper. We can still read the Dead Sea Scrolls. But if they were the Dead CD-ROMs, forget it.

The ultimate irony would be attempts at electronic packaging. Go ahead, ship that box of Wheaties over the internet. Irony persists during periods of change. As we shifted from letterpress to offset litho, we were setting type with hot metal and then pulling inked proofs to paste-up on boards so we could shoot them in cameras to make film to burn onto plates. Soon we figured out how to go directly to the film and then to the plate and now to the press. Going to screen is easiest of all. Most printers and suppliers think the industry will come back to where it was. But that will not happen.

There are seismic changes in how we print, what we print, how much we print, and who prints. Print will play a role, but not a dominant one. And after 560 years, that is ironic.

Frank Romano is professor emeritus at the Rochester Institute of Technology

Comment below to have your say on this story.

If you have a news story or tip-off, get in touch at editorial@sprinter.com.au.  

Sign up to the Sprinter newsletter