I have lamented several times here that the printing industry seems rather anti-Internet. Part of what leads me to that opinion is the number of print industry blogs out there. For an industry this big, there just aren’t many. I think I’m the only person employed by a printing company who’s blogging at all about the business.
If not, I’m sure all of us would like to hear from you.

There were four of us, really about 2 and half because neither Joel Friedman nor I have posted a bunch lately, leaving Dr. Joe and Adam Dewitz to do the heavy lifting.

Now there is a new guy - Dimitri Ploumidis, with PrintColor. He’s at RIT with Adam, and it will be on color management, ICC profiling, soft and hard copy proofing, etc.

Welcome to the party Dimitri!

I just got done posting about how the printing industry needs to take the lead in internet applications, in order to keep print alive and thriving as a media. Then it ocurred to me that I hadn’t really contributed a solution, I’d just restated the problem. I’d better fix that ;-)

Here’s a framework for finding the opportunities:

Become a user of the Internet. I don’t mean just the typical stuff any late-adopter would do, like Google searches or email. I’m talking about the new stuff. Web 2.0. Web 2.x and 3.x. Whatever you want to call it. Get on the leading, bleeding edge. Yes, this will take some time and even some conversations with few zealots to learn the ins and outs. I am sure you have a few working for you.

You need to become a user of this stuff. Become enough of a user that you depend on it. That you need it, at least whatever stuff you can end up needing, because some of it actually is garbage. But there’s a lot out there that isn’t.

OK, you are a user and you are dependant. Now for the valuable part:

Get rid of your laptop, and PDA.

What are you missing? What do you really wish you had printed on paper in your briefcase? I bet you there will be something. If you want it, likely there are others, maybe lots of others. Start printing it.

How about a custom printed magazine that contained all the blog posts from all of my best customers who are bloggers, that I can stick in the can and read while I’m in there? How about doing this for all the blogs in a particular industry, or in a particular region?

How about a Flickr catalog, sold to subscribers? Or a Linkedin directory? These companies probably won’t work very hard to promote a paper copy. You see, they don’t own printing presses or binding and distribution equipment and don’t really want to buy any. But they could probably be convinced to partner up with folks who do.

How about just a general printing and distribution service for the Internet - whatever you want, we’ll print it, bind it, and send it to you on a regular basis. I can think of a whole bunch of reasons why this could be very valuable. I can also see that some of it will fit the much of the printing, binding and distribution models already in place. Of course, there will be some adjustments required, and that might just require some equipment, much like my employer could produce, but that, I assure you, is beside the point.

The point is that the web will create opportunity for printing, if we want to make something of it.

Dr. Joe Webb, ever the ray of sunshine regarding the printing business, raises an interesting point in a recent post: PIA/GATF recently commented on the SEC’s proposed rules change that would allow companies to get away without PRINTING various reports, proxies, etc. Naturally the comments were the predictable siren song of people clinging to their cheese: Do not move the cheese! Printing these reports is important to us, and making us stop will do Bad Things and our suppliers.

The good doctor states:

Our industry sounds like a barrier to progress, protecting decidedly outmoded means of communications, when it actually needs a good swift kick in the behind. We’re already being referred to as “offline media” and reference to us as “legacy media” has been common in recent years. I’d rather be putting out a story about how our companies are already on top of this issue. After all, EDGAR, the electronic reporting service of the SEC has been around for about 20 years.

This reminds me of something Guy Kawasaki explained in his video How to drive your competition crazy (which is very good by the way). He told the story of how once upon a time we kept things cold with ice that as mined from mountain lakes. Folks used to go up to the mountain, take a saw and cut out chunks of ice and haul them away. They actually warehoused the stuff, and even shipped it around the world.

That is until somebody invented machines that made ice. Do you think it was the mountain lake ice miners? Hell no - it was someone else, and that was Guy’s point. It’s really, really difficult to be a “curve jumper” - the guy who comes up with the replacement for existing technology - but if you don’t learn to do it someone else will and you lose. What do you suppose the ice miners were doing as the ice machines were being promoted? I’m guessing they were writing letters to the government complaining that that the use of ice making machines will do Bad Things to the ice mining industry and it’s suppliers, and the FDA should ban them or something.

Printing will never completely go away, but large parts of it will. To whom all that new business goes will depend on who comes up with these new forms of media. The printing companies should be in an excellent position to do this, if they can secure the vision to do it. It’s making me miss Harry more than ever.

The printing industry needs to be looking at how its value could be displaced and learn these technologies better than anyone else before anyone else does. The printing industry should have been the one offering to automate the reports, and it should be doing the same with everything else it prints. Someone else will if we don’t. If they can’t learn on their own, they need to make the right acquisitions. What kind of printing opportunities might have come out of owning Flickr, or Blogger, or Wikipedia?

Printing and the Internet CAN go together. Will the printing companies create these opportunities? Or will they wait for the web companies to do it?