PROBLEM OF PRINT, THE

Print Action, Mar 2004 by McIlroy, Thad

"Paper: A medium used to freeze digital information in a form that cannot be modified or searched, is quickly out of date, and requires an expensive infrastructure to distribute and stored."

-Source: Gartner Group

There are so many things that print does well. It can offer great image reproduction in black-and-white or colour. It can be tremendously portable. It can offer immediacy. For most adults in North America and much of the rest of the world, print represents a host of respected cultural values, values they cherish and wish to retain.

And then along came the World Wide Web. Image reproduction can be problematic. It's not as portable as paper. The cultural values of print are lacking from the Web. But, boy does it have immediacy. And interactivity. And low cost per impression. And a range of other great features. As a result, it's kicking print's ass.

But few in the print community want to acknowledge this. I haven't seen such an organized case of denial since the introduction of desktop publishing.

Nothing so represents the printing community's myopic defensiveness as the current slogan, "Print: The Original Information Technology," adopted as the heart of a print awareness campaign by the Printing Industries of America (PIA), the Graphic Arts Technical Foundation (GATF) and many PIA affiliates "in a consolidated effort to unite an industry and champion the value of print among the general public."

In an article about the campaign, the associations claim that, "without print, other revolutionary information technologies such as the telephone, the television, the computer or the internet could not have been invented." Technically true, I suppose, but hardly the point. I think that this campaign is terribly misguided. Does anyone really think that a popup banner on The New York Times Website with the slogan "Print: The Original Information Technology" is going to encourage people to put down their mice and head out to the newsstand?

Print as information technology? Wrong. Print is not an information technology. That's not print's key strength. Print is presentation. Print is portability. Print is convenience. Print is tactile. Print is beautiful. Print is not an information technology. It is a centuries-old craft that presents ideas and images in a manner designed to aid the reader to absorb the artifacts of our culture.

The internet is information technology. Everyone knows that if you want to get the most up-to-the-moment information, go online, not to the newsstand.

But that doesn't mean printing isn't a great communications medium. There are so many wonderful things about print, so many things we can remind the public of, without trying to be IT-cool.

Packaging and labels are unquestionably not going onto the Web. Stationery and envelopes don't work there, although email has greatly reduced volumes in this category. And, yes, wallpaper and wrapping paper don't seem to have an electronic equivalent as yet. In nearly every other major category the Web is at least a competitive medium with print, in some cases better, in other cases, not as effective.

There are some things that can be done to make print more competitive, there are other issues that cannot be touched. For print to remain in the running it has to address the challenges that can be solved. These fall into the areas of cost, turnaround and personalization. I'll look at these in more detail on page 28, but for now I want to examine the impediments print faces in trying to get its act together.

Frank Cost, a professor at the College of Imaging Arts and Sciences at RIT wrote a research monograph that was published in late 2002. Innocuously titled Design to Production: The Critical Interface, it might have been better titled, Why the Printing Industry is an Inefficient Mess. Cost outlines a host of reasons for the inefficiency in several different areas.

One that he covers particularly well is the dynamic of colour printing today. "The underlying reality in colour print buying is that the client does not know what he wants until he sees something physical. In common practice today, that something is the contract proof made by the printer," writes Cost. "Print buying is like buying a bottle of wine in a fine restaurant. The purchase is agreed to only after the wine has been tasted. But unlike the wine tasting analogy, where the first bottle is rarely rejected, in print buying the first proof is usually not acceptable. Print buyers are like wine tasters who routinely send the first bottle back but pay for it anyway (emphasis added).

Cost points out that printers are happy with this arrangement. Proofing is a profit centre - the more the merrier. But why are the buyers willing to embrace what is apparently an illogical and inefficient process?

I argue that there is in face an unwritten and unexamined underlying conspiracy between print buyers and print sellers. The buyer says to the printer: "You continue to pretend that colour printing is incredibly complex, thereby, justify the face that we get paid to manage you. We in turn will agree that colour printing is inherently very tough to manufacture, thereby justifying the money we pay to you."