There was a recent announcement that a UK printer is taking delivery of the first “Carbon Balanced” printing press, manfucatured by KBA. This isn’t very surprising because there is a lot of talk about carbon footprint, carbon offsets, and carbon everything else as people become more concerned with climate change and the socio-economic force it has as a political item.

It’s very surprising because printers are pretty pragmatic people, who aren’t usually given to spending money without a pretty darned clear understanding of the return on their invesment. While it’s easy to sell the idea of carbon balancing on the basis of principle, I expected the actual pricing to be a lot harder. I’m not surprised that a UK printer cares about climate change, I’m surprised he was willing to pay for the carbon balancing. Although the article doesn’t say what amount was paid for the carbon balancing, or even what it consists of.

As the political forces generated by threatening climate change drive people to value carbon footprints we will see a new currency emerge - carbon. the problem I see with this is that we’re not actually measuring the amount of carbon involved, instead the whole thing is based on calculations of how much carbon is believed to be emitted. These calculations are not always very simple. In calculating the carbon footprint of the beer I just drank, do I include the can? It’s recyclable, but what if I don’t recycle it? How about the salty popcorn that drove me to want the beer in the first place? Should its carbon footprint include the carbon from the beer that was clearly an inevitable result? Will the International Association of Carbon-Emiting Corporations come to the same quantity of carbon emitted for a given product as Americans Scared Shitless Of Climate Change, or the International Coalition of Carbon Trading Companies? Who decides what the right amount is?

An ounce of gold is an ounce of gold, and an ounce is clearly understood. That’s what enables the gold market to function.

Is a ton of emitted carbon as clearly understood? I don’t think so. So how is this market going to function?

I think initially the politcal value of balancing carbon footprints will be high enough, and the pricing of the balancing low enough, that it won’t be enough money to cause serious problems. The question is if carbon footprints will stay hot enough (pun intended) long enough for their value to get high enough to fight over. Eventually you and I are likely to pay extra for every product purely for carbon offsets. Before we get to that point, I think we’d better understand how this new currency will be established.

I joined PrintPlanet.com today, and saw a post from Hlynur Gudlaugsson who asked:

Hello guys…

What is the future of printing regarding all the technoligy around us?
Is the print industry going to die in coming years or will it just take
another turn to adjust to new thinking and consumer ways?

The internet is one of the most potent advertising media you can use
regarding information to consumer. Is it going to effect the industry
in that sense that people will loose jobs or will this create new
barriers for us to overcome or will the “black art” die as we know it?

Would be nice to get your tought´s on this one:-)

Regards from Iceland.

A great question, and one that I think all of us in the print industry ask each other pretty frequently. I’d say it almost rivals the weather as topic of conversation.

Here’s my prediction on the future of print

First, a few observations:

1. The Internet is NOT the most potent advertising medium anyone can use. At least, the advertising I respond to most frequently is on a magazine page, not a web page. Internet advertising is by FAR the most accessible advertising medium anyone can use. With many providers (i.e. Adwords) you can be advertising anything worldwide in multiple languages in less than half an hour for $5 or so. Try that with print.
2. I haven’t yet replaced the magazine rack in my bathroom with a computer, despite there being room and an unused laptop in the house. We have about 4 magazines that we get, along with various catalogs we hang onto. With a small house and two small kids, the bathroom doubles as the reading room ;-).
3. I do not like paperless statements. Anything advertised on a statement is blackballed immediately.
4. I don’t hang onto but one catalog from a company. Land’s End - you send me a new catalog about every other week. As an employee of QuadGraphics, I think you profusely. As a customer, I need only the Men’s version, and only when you offer something really new.
5. The printed material I get that is personalized is increasing in quality, or at the least is holding in quality. Meaning the quality of the paper, special features like embossing, etc.
6. The printed material I get that is not personalized is generally decreasing in quality, with the exception of Men’s Health magazine, which is becoming a few flimsy Ed. pages slipped in between massive thick fragrance, fashion and car ads.

I think some kinds of print are going to die, but some new kinds of print will be created. The net effect will be more printing of items that can be personalized and that benefit from the nature of print (the permanence, readability, etc.) to carry an unwritten message. There will be less of those items that just work much better on the ‘net. Like classified ads, many kinds of reference material, some of the market for books & catalogs, and most newsletters.

When I worked in engineering I started at a company that still used drafting boards, and currently work for a company that’s pretty much paperless in terms of drawings. At least, we don’t have much use for large format plotter/printers anymore. The trend seemed to be that the volume of paper on an engineer’s desk skyrocketed as the company adopted CAD, but then as the automation was fully internalized the engineer’s need for a paper copy (for reviewing, proofing, etc) quickly went away and those piles disappeared very quickly.

I think print markets will mirror that. Following a surge of printing in some markets driven by the internet  we’ll see a decline as new generations not addicted to paper for every application filter out those applications where printing really adds value. I think this will happen pretty quickly in a given region, but the world being diverse as it is it will be slow globally speaking.

The printing that’s left over will be either very low quality/low cost in applications where printing’s the only solution (direct mail advertising works better than direct email advertising), or high quality/high personalization/high value added because it is a piece of a larger communication offering.

For example, consider what’s happening to magazines. Thinner paper, smaller trim sizes, etc.  - they’re moving to low cost because the print version magazine competes with the internet offering. Now imagine that we have full variable data printing, and the magazine can now be personalized to contain the stuff the reader wants and adds a lot more value. Now the subscriber is buying the paper version because it’s paper, and will want more of the qualities that paper has to offer and will be willing to pay for them.

Same with brochures. When they’re a high-volume give-away they need to be cheaper to produce. When they can carry more value, they can cost more.

So to summarize, print’s always going to be around. There will be less of it, and it will be either a lot more efficient or a lot more innovative than it is now.

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Andy Tribute, of Attribute Associates, wrote a short article today on WhatTheyThink.com, one of printing’s original web news sources. In his article he poses a question on the future of press control based on AVT’s recent acquisition of GMI.

The article doesn’t offer much in the way of meat, but Andy does get around to describing the histories of both companies, contrasting their markets, and then theorizes that the ultimate solution for a press control is to combine AVT’s inspection products with GMI’s color and register control products into one control product that does everything. He says that no such systems exist today. That’s not exactly true, but surely no such product is sweeping the market.

There are good reasons why such a product hasn’t been successfully introduced in the past:

1. Inspection products are popular in roll-to-roll processes where it’s not possible to grab a sample to inspect. However in sheetfed and web-to-folder applications it’s easy to grab sample copies for inspection and quality assurance purposes. Why buy a product to automate sample-grabbing when you’ve got a press operator there to do it anyway?
2. Color control isn’t the same kind of beast on Flexo that it is on Offset - see Dr. John Anderson’s excellent article Adding Flexo to an Offset Operation in the September issue of Flexo magazine for details - so bolting ColorQuick onto a flexo press isn’t going to work.
3. Register control is also a different beast on Flexo label presses with much less space between units and different cutoff needs.
4. Flexo label presses generally cost less than GMI’s typical host press, which means the ceiling for the total cost of controls is lower. This means a do-everything product needs to cost a lot less than the sum of its parts. Both companies make Cadillac products, and turning two Cadillacs into a Hyundai is no easy task.
5. GMI’s strength has always been their use of a spectrophotometer to give true spectral data. However their Spectrophotometer doesn’t provide images, and AVT’s camera doesn’t provide true spectra data, so to get both spectral data and an image for inspection you really end up with both sensor packages. Even so, nothing is preventing anyone from buying both systems and installing them both on a press today. Anyone know of such an installation?
6. AVT’s label product, PrintVision/Helios, already does die cut registration and color deviation. What is ColorQuick going to add?
7. Last but not least AVT needs to digest GMI’s US and Indian development operations and get everyone working together, not always an easy task.

I don’t think a combined product is in AVT’s plans. There just isn’t much bang for the buck in such a system, even if they could make one affordable for the labels market. It’s seductive to think a “total image control system” is the ultimate product that everyone will want to buy, but unless such a product removes a body from the press line (care to guess how many operators are on a typical inline labels press?) or saves enough waste to earn its keep, folks aren’t going to buy it.

I think AVT needed to grow to meet expectations, and GMI provided a convenient way to do that and provide some adjacent market access at the same time.

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