The Power of Print: An Industry for the Ages

Last month, I joined Epson at their Digital Couture Fashion Week event in New York City which you can read all about on page 18 and 19. During my time with their team, I spoke with one of the Account Managers overseeing sales in North America and South America. Out of curiosity, I asked him how he began his career in print and he told me his grandfather used to head up the Boston Globe, introducing him to print when he worked “the presses downstairs". When we’re so deeply entrenched in all conversations print, I believe it’s easy to forget how rich the history of this industry has been up to this point.

Over the last few months, I’ve gotten a sense that murmurs surrounding print’s descent from the “golden age before digital” aren’t going away. I’ve been privy to even more conversations about how companies are readjusting in the face of digital and what happened to the companies that just couldn’t. Yet why is it I hear so little about how resilient print is? Before Gutenberg invented the press, Chinese monks were setting ink to wooden blocks, effectively pressing books onto paper as early as 868 during the Tang Dynasty. We’ve come a very long way from the days of wooden blocks but the need vivid collateral and the successful exchange of information across corners of the world remains. Print is an industry for the ages because it predates the digital era and it will be here long after. How many times have you relied on the digital, say an agenda you saved as a PDF on your phone, only to be disappointed when it dies leaving you empty-handed?

As Thayer Long, President of the Association for Print Technologies, expressed on Page 29, convergence between the digital and the analog has already happened. We are now in a time that simply demands our industry gets creative. The vitality of the industry and the greater share of the market will be won by companies that remain positive about this massive opportunity. The world is making new ideas possible and print is an industry for yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Let’s move the world forward by talking and thinking so.