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>> RON GOLDBERG: Today's webinar is in entitled "From Flyers to Functional Printing: The Future
of Print" and our presenter is Frank Romano, professor emeritus of the school of printing.
Frank has spent over 40 years in the printing and publishing industries. Many know him best
as the editor of the International Paper Pocket Pal or from the hundreds of articles that
he has written for publications from North America and Europe to the Middle East to Asia
and Australia. He is the author of over 50 books including
the 10,000 term Encyclopedia of Graphic Communications with Richard Romano. His books on QuarkXPress
and Adobe InDesign and pdf workflow were among the first in their fields. He has authored
most of the books on digital printing. Frank has founded eight publications serving as
editor or publisher for TypeWorld/Electronic Publishing, computer artist, color publishing
and the Typographer and EP&P and both the NCPA and PrintRIT journals.
He has consulted for major corporations, publishers, government and other users of digital printing
and publishing technology. He wrote the first report on the on demand digital printing in
1980 and he ran the first conference on the subject in 1985. Although formally retired
from the faculty Frank continues to teach courses here at RIT and other universities.
And he works with students on unique research projects. He lectures extensively having addressed
every club, association, group and professional organization at one time or another. Frank
is one of the industry's foremost keynote speakers. And today he will share his insights
in to the future of printing. It's pretty exciting. And now we will turn it over to
Frank to start the presentation. >> FRANK ROMANO: This introduction is longer
than the presentation. So everyone the reason that we are doing this presentation is because
I get asked so many questions about the future of print from Wall Street Journal and Business
Week. And editors and reporters are calling me all the time. They have the mindset that
the print is dead and the Internet has taken over everything. So here is a little chart that shows the 13 primary categories.
They don't have functional printing in here because that's a new category but these are
the major categories of print products. And really what you have to do is understand each
one of them in order to understand where print is going because some of these printed products
will die. They will go away. And some of them will prosper and grow. Therefore when you
take all of them together you then see the pluses and minuses and can develop a scenario
to where we are going in to print in to the future.
Now as you can see the largest category is advertising and promotional material. I will
get in to that. There is flyers and brochures and things like that. The second largest category
is packaging. And the third largest category is direct mail and then breaks down in to
all of the others. I am going to go through each one of the categories in agonizing detail
so you get a better idea of what's happening in print. And, of course, you all have the
ability to send questions as we go along and in some cases I will take the question immediately
and maybe in some cases we will wait towards the end. In any case you will have an opportunity
to ask any question you wish. Let's talk about books and it is dear to my
heart. Having written 54 books I love everything about books. You have to admit that the world
has changed. I was just on a ship around the world and the average age was 80 and because
I used to wear my RIT shirt and carry my computer with me the little old ladies on the ship
thought I was tech support. And they would come up to me to help set up Nooks and Kindles
and what I discovered on the Queen Mary 2 because it has a library of over 4,000 volumes
elderly people who are using electronic reading devices which tells you that the world has
changed. Now at the same time if you look at the statistics
of 2013 books of all kinds, printed books of all kinds were up about 22%. So at the
same time that the electronic book world is growing the print book world is growing as
well. The little chart that you see over on the left is Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.
You can see that we have now reached the point where the number of e books and the number
of printed books is the same. It is interesting to watch that in to the future, but my feeling
there will always be some kind of a 50/50 split or something like that between the electronic
world and the printed world. And the reason is that in some cases you want to save the
printed book or you want the book autographed by someone. By the way are you going to have
them autograph your Kindle? That would be pretty messy at some point in time.
The little chart over there at the top are some of the books that I have students produce
because I do a class where it is four days and the students have to produce a book in
four days. We have all the technology at RIT to do that. They all complain somewhat at
the beginning but by the end they love the fact that they leave the class with an actual
bound book that is their own. At the bottom I have Ray Bradbury and he died last year.
He had a book about burning books, Fahrenheit 451. It was a book about a world in the future
because people were memorizing books because they were going to be disappearing. When he
died last year sales of Fahrenheit 451 quadrupled. The growth in the book industry has been in
the photo book area and that's because we all have our cell phones and all taking pictures
all the time. How do you save them? How do you share them? Sometimes you print them out
on your home printer but in many cases you can upload to a number of different services.
I do that on a regular basis for my family because still they are not going to be able
to see all these pictures. My mother saved all the pictures when I was a kid and they
went in to an album or a shoebox. In the electronic world I don't know what you will have in the
future to share your memories with. Photo books are doing very well. Self published
books are doing very well. People who want to be an author. So there are so many services
out there that let you create a book. The last book I bought from Amazon was a printed
book of an elder print book that was in a library in Scotland. I wanted a printed copy
of that book. So that is a major market. Google books you can scan through books all over
the world. And if you want it, there are services that are print it on demand for you. It is
not like the original but it is more or less the same content and the same format. Specialty
books of various kinds, presentations, proposals. So there is a lot happening in the book world
that we don't keep track of anymore. We don't understand it because if it doesn't have an
ISBN number there is no way whether anybody knows whether it is selling or not selling
and a lot of these books don't go through that kind of a system. The ISBN books are
the ones that everyone can track. We know they are up by the way because even with a
few bookstores that are left in America we know what the sales are from the bookstores
on a regular basis. Books will be there and there will be changes in this world. On demand
printing probably has done more to get books alive than any other technology. Magazines,
the periodical marketplace, there is still 18,000 titles of magazines in the United States.
One of my favorite is one called Garbage. A gas station attendant, still out there,
believe it or not. There is 19 magazines in the chicken field. I don't know why. In fact,
I love magazines because that's how I created my wealth. I started a magazine from scratch
on my dining room table and built it up and sold it to the big publishing company. There
are some magazines that are disappearing. Remember last year Newsweek said they were
stopping the print edition and only going electronic. And they just announced they are
getting back in to a print edition. Most magazines have a limited number of copies and they have
increased the amount of content going through the website, but they still have a printed
edition because unless you put something in front of me on a regular basis I am really
not going to go to your website all the time. I don't sit there every day and say I want
to go to the TIME Magazine website. It doesn't work that way. It usually works I have to
have an incentive and the incentive is the printed magazine. I read something in TIME
Magazine and I go to their website for more information or follow up on something else.
So magazines are doing okay except for advertising income. This is what affected them. It is
usually a 50/50 ratio between the number of pages and the number of ads in any printed
magazine. And advertising dollars have shifted over to the electronic world. That has limited
the number of pages. Magazines have gotten smaller and the page count has gone down.
But we haven't seen too many magazines die. There is a guy from the University of Mississippi
who keeps track of the magazines in the United States. He sees the printed magazine as a
viable publication but they are all augmented by the electronic side of things. Peer review
journals, the companies that publish the peer review journals which are very common to academia
and science and medical they are very expensive. Harvard University by the way wanted to cut
a whole batch out recently. Many of them are trying to go electronic and the publishing
companies are trying to charge as much for the electronic edition as they charge for
the printed edition. A lot going on in the journal field. There will still be journals
and still have printed journals and some of that content will be electronic. Newsletters
have disappeared. Now I can put that on a website or do it as an e mail feed.
Reprints and preprints that's another reason for the printed magazine. A lot of companies
want to print the article in the magazine so they can use it for promotion. And the
thing you don't see as much anymore are reply cards. You remember you pick up a magazine
and the reply card would fall out? Once I picked up a reply card and the magazine fell
out. You don't see them anymore because now more or less you can go to a website. QR codes
are helping the magazine industry because you can hold your cell phone in front of the
QR code and it will take you to the website. Certainly has not seen a reduction in the
number of magazines. If you look on Forbes 500, you look for the people who have the
greatest wealth in the United States. What you discover is that about a third of them
made their wealth in the magazine publishing industry. So there is still a market there.
Catalog, I love the catalog marketplace. I used to review the Sears Roebuck catalog and
I used to rush home at Christmastime to get home before the wish list, remember the wish
book, before the kids saw it. The big catalogs are gone. The first catalog in America was
not the Sears catalog. It was the Montgomery Ward catalog. He made his catalog slightly
smaller than Montgomery Ward. So every home had both. And so Sears went on top and everyone
remembers Sears. Nobody remembers Montgomery Ward. We talk about environmental. When the
new one came out the old Sears catalog went in to the outhouse. And this is great because
the recent catalogs evolved because of the postal system. You can deliver something in
every home in America. And their mail order with parcel post allowed you to buy almost
anything. You could buy a house through Sears. They would ship you all the parts and you
put the house together. I was once doing a seminar in Cincinnati.
And there was a TV show that was showing the Sears houses and they show the beams that
showed the code numbers on it and said put this beam next to this beam. In any case as
time has gone by the web has affected the catalog market world. At one time I would
get 60 to 100 catalogs in the house. I don't get that anymore. But they are still there.
They are smaller and the objective is to get me to go to the website. It is called click
or visit. That is go to the website or go to the store. Now the problem is you go to
most of the stores and they don't have everything. You have to order online if you want most
of the things that are sold by many of the large catalog companies. The biggest catalog
today is IKEA, of course, on a worldwide basis. There are consumer catalogs, business catalogs
and, of course, most of them today are hybrid where they print the covers by reviewer because
I am sorry, they print the inside by the reviewer and they print the covers by offset lithography.
I don't see the catalog market going away. I see it sort of holding its own and companies,
marketing companies are discovering that you need the incentive of the printed catalog
to take an action, whether going to the website or going to the store. Newspaper, if you do
a Google search for a newsstand you get a picture of the Apple newsstand or the Google
newsstand. You don't get a picture of a newsstand, if you will.
Now newspapers have been the most affected by the digital world. The reason I have the
picture up there from the New York Times reporting the Titanic down and the Costa Concordia,
it took five days before anyone heard about the Titanic and the Costa Concordia, I was
on the Queen Mary 2 and the president of the the captain of the Queen Mary 2 came on the
loud speaker and said one of our sister ships has gone aground in Italy and it happened
20 minutes before. Think about that. The knowledge of this accident was worldwide within 20 minutes.
With satellite communication and the Internet and that picture by the way immediately ran
in to the Internet and you did a search and immediately that picture came up. So this
is the world we are in. So the question is what does a newspaper offer
any more. Local news, I get that on television. National news I get that from cable. The news
that it happened I can get that on my cell phone, my iPad or whatever it may be. We have
lost half of all the newspapers in America. When people get printed they are thinking
more or less about newspapers because they have been the most affected by the Internet
and by electronic communication. Now weeklies haven't gone down that fast but they are going
down. Advertising dollars are leaving. And it is not coming back. Newspapers are trying
to reinvent themselves. They are trying to be websites but they find that people aren't
as loyal to the website as they were to the printed copy or a new publisher takes over
and the first thing they do is raise the newsstand price and now they are pricing newspapers
out of the market. There might be a short term jump in revenue, but long term it does
affect the circulation days. Circulation is the things that is keeping newspapers alive
is inserts. And now companies are toying with home delivery and even mail to get inserts
to every home or every location within a particular town or city. So it is a kind of a sad story
when we realize how much we grew up on newspapers, but my feeling is you may still have some
national newspapers and a few large city dailies but over time the number of newspapers will
dwindle to a low number. Why do we need a telephone directory? Think
about this for a second. You want to find a phone number, you go to Google. You go online.
It is so easy. Why do I even need a Yellow Pages. If I want to find a company I can search
for, I can search for Chinese restaurants, Henrietta, New York and reviews will come
up and there will be a link to the website for a menu. My cartoon there they are digging
up a phonebook and they are saying what is that. Some day people will ask why did you
have a phonebook. By the way the middle picture, the picture of a recycling site with all of
last year's phone books that are there, so right now the I think 11 states, Verizon has
petitioned 11 states to do away with the White Pages phonebook and it is probably going to
happen. It is a regulatory thing. The reason we have the White Pages was part of the 1934
Telecommunications Act. Many are now getting in to websites.
Yellow Pages will probably last a little longer. Within the next decade phonebooks will be
a vestigal thing. Part of an archeological thing. This is one of the major categories
of printing. It is promotional, advertising. You say advertising it sounds like an ad in
a magazine. And that's not what we are talking about. Let's take a single sheet of paper,
folded or unfolded, printed one or two sides and we call that a flyer. I take a sheet of
paper, maybe larger, printed one or two sides and I fold it. That's called a folded or a
brochure. That's easy. I take a whole batch of them and I mesh them inside and it is still
called a brochure. A circular can be either a brochure or a booklet. Ad insert can be
a brochure or a booklet. We call an ad insert because we insert it in something else. We
call it a circular because we circulate it on the street corner and give it out to people.
These are the major categories of promotional material. You go to a bank and there is a
whole rack of brochures on loans and CD rates and mortgages and things like that. You go
to any hotel and there is a rack of brochures for tours, touristy things that you want to
do. You go to a trade show, go booth by booth and what do you leave with. You leave with
some printed piece. Our joke is that if you go to any trade show your job everyone is
listening to this webinar. Your job is to pick up a brochure at every booth and at the
end of the aisle conveniently located are trash receptacles to discard it. All of you
are part of my groupie group and you will go to all of these events and consume print,
if you will, and I will be checking up on you. So can you replace all of this stuff?
Can you go booth by booth and pick up a CD? Hey I have a Mac Air. My Macintosh Air has
no CD reader in it. I had to have a separate unit and I don't lug that around with me.
Within the next few years CDs won't exist. We are downloading our movies, uploading our
audio and our music. Over time we are not going to see a big market in CDs. Even on
software is coming electronically and all the upgrades are coming electronically. And
the other day I was cleaning out a drawer and I found a whole batch of AOL diskettes.
And then they sent you tons of CDs. You don't see any of that anymore because again you
go online and can download almost anything you want, especially Spam and all kinds of
vicious software. So this category to me is a major category of print and does not go
away. In fact, it continues to grow. It was the first category to apply digital printing.
Because as run lanes went down, the volume of print, the quantity that you were printing
was right in the sweet spot for digital printing and that's really what generated the growth
in digital printing over the last decade. Now whether you use toner or ink jet you are
generating promotional material. You can put all the information in these flyers and brochures
on our website. You can send it to my e mail or pdf file but it is not the same thing as
having a printed piece. Recently I did a video about an article I
read in a local paper about Kiosks, replacing promotional material in tourist areas. That's
the dumbest idea ever. Because it is a brochure it is in a rack and I can see the things that
are there and pick the ones that I want. If it is a Kiosk, I have to stand in front of
the Kiosk and go through a whole batch of things. I am going to need a whole batch of
Kiosks because I am going to need a batch of people. At the same time, all the people
can be looking at the rack at the same time. You still need print in order to promote certain
activities, whether they be sales or tourism or whatever it may be. So this to me is a
growth area and it is one of the things that keeps the printing industry alive.
Now one of the things I do is I travel the world and it is pretty weird. I take pictures
of mailboxes. Not many people do this by the way. Again because I go on ships and travel
the world. I get to visit some interesting places from Budapest, to Prague to UK and
Bangkok. You notice all the different kinds of mailboxes that are out there. We are talking
about direct mail. Now if you notice on the lower right picture, and in fact, the two
lower right pictures, in many European countries right next to most mailboxes especially home
mailboxes especially were trash receptacles. So people would sort through their mail and
throw away the ad mail and keep whatever they wanted and move on. In New Zealand in their
home mailboxes there would be little signs saying no junk mail. You leave this to the
post person to decide whether that's junk mail or not. That's an interesting one right
there. So they determine what mail you get at that point.
So in any case the mail system although it has had its problems and they are raising
rates momentarily and they decided not to cut set delivery but direct mail is an important
part we promote and communicate and we have lost volume in this area mostly because a
lot of the envelope mail soliciting credit cards has gone down and a lot of your mail
for bills and statements because many of us pay our bills and statements electronically
they have gone away. So the printed side of the world, it seems to decline here, but people
still need to get something to you to have you take an action. So today the most popular
form of direct mail is the postcard. And that's because it is inexpensive and now you are
seeing the very large rotunda of postcards and that's the result of like four postal
increases ago they allow these larger postcards. Self mail is the second most popular form
of direct mail. And could be almost any size but then folded so it can be mailed and the
new postal regulations require tabbing all over the place. So it is kind of limited that
world but it is still growing. Booklets are the third largest and then envelope mail comes
after that. Mail is still there. People depend on mail for lots of reasons. Again even though
they keep trying to force us in to electronic world but you still need print from time to
time. And also a reason to get me to take an action. I can't imagine why that people
have my birth date and I get more mail nowadays saying I should go to this restaurant on my
birthday or buy this gift on my birthday, whatever it may be. That's interesting by
the way. The day I die I will still have some restaurant in Boulder, Massachusetts sending
me a greeting. We have seen a reduction in direct mail but
it is going to come back up when people realize that you need to give people an incentive
to take an action and that is to go to a website. Now tech doc, with every software package
you got a software manual and with every computer you got an operating manual. In fact, the
thing that made the Xerox doc techie, if you go back in time to when it was introduced
in 1990 its major market was producing manuals and it is perfect for that. Because it had
the online collation and binding. Since then most of these manuals have gone away. They
are either large pdf files or they are help files built in to the software. Adobe used
to ship all their software in a bunch of CD ROMs and it came in the big box as a manual
in it. Now they don't ship the box because it is all online. So manuals, guides, tech
bulletins, more or less that whole marketplace has gone away. You find those little white
sheets that come with every appliance or electronic gadget. They are in six languages. I remember
I was reading Spanish until I realized it wasn't English because they don't put them
in any particular order. So you have to figure out where the English is and then I don't
know what language they wrote it in originally, but they translated it back in to English.
So following it it is not easy. That's still the market. It is the little instruction sheets
that you get with all of your appliances or whatever. I had a friend that told me they
bought an appliance and they got a sheet that said if you want the instruction manual, go
to this website. Everyone that bought an appliance like that would have access to the Internet,
I guess the assumption is probably true. Some day if you want a manual you go to the website
and you print it out yourself. You use your home printer and your own expensive ink jet
ink in order to do that. So this marketplace again is one of those marketplaces that has
been reduced and probably will disappear over time.
Legal financial, now those of you in the printing business will remember that in the spring
of almost every year you could not get anything printed in the United States because annual
reports were being printed. Because again the SEC, Securities and Exchange Commission
require that all companies had to publish an annual report to their stockholders. Companies
would use it as a promotion piece. So it would be color, graphics. I remember the prepress
on the IBM annual report alone was a million dollars. Paul Rand was the designer and he
used embossing and die cutting and three different kinds of paper and nine spot colors and it
was the most gorgeous thing you had seen but it cost a fortune. Over time as the SEC implemented
EDGAR, the electronic reporting system, you had to file your annual report and 10K and
quarterly reports electronically. When that happened a lot of companies opted
out of doing a printed annual report. They might design one and put a pdf version on
the website but they didn't print one. I'll never forget a few years ago the Intel annual
report in the president's message said we would prefer that you download the pdf version
so we can save on printing. So little by little the annual report marketplace dwindled to
a very low number. Now in this category I have also got transactional printing and transpromo
which is a term they use for building statements that are in color. Those marketplaces are
still there, and because of the introduction of colors even though you might do electronic
banking or electronic statements probably a few times a year you get a printed version
every now and then. And the thing is they will put a little notice in it we are mailing
this to you for you to verify all the information to check the content to make sure for security
reasons we have everything correct. What they are doing now is they are selling advertising
on statements or inserting inserts for advertising in the envelope. So transactional and transpromo
still have a life because they realize the one thing that you don't throw away is your
gas bill, electric bill. You open it. Even though the insert falls out, or the ad part
of the statement, even if you are not concerned you still see it. That's what they are counting
on. That's why that marketplace is going to grow.
Legal reports, still around. Although I do a lot of legal testimony work almost all of
it today is based on an electronic communication, pdf files, but when you go to the trial they
have tons of paper there. IPOs, public offerings they still do the booklets in print and the
financial materials that also have to be in print because your mortgage has to be in print
when you sign it. Your deed is in print. Legal documents that define your life trying to
get your an initial passport without a birth certificate, go there and show them a pdf
of it. I am sorry, that will not work. So there are still a lot of need for printed
materials to verify who you are and what you do. Remember the days when you had a desk
drawer full of paper that had one word on it, that word was memo. And you would put
it in your typewriter. Some of you will remember a typewriter. And you would type out a memo
to someone. Well, you don't do that anymore, do you? You open up a your browser and you
do e mail and you hit send and it is gone. And you put as many people on there as possible.
I remember using carbon paper. The more people that were on the list the last person would
get a gray blur as a sheet of paper. So today most of our communication in an office is
really by e mail on our intranet. Yes, there is still reports that are printed but most
people pass around pdfs and Word files and Excel files. Even though we do our powerpoint
presentations most people print them out so we can make notes on them. There are still
some printing forms, although a lot of forms today, the other day I was doing a new course
proposal here at RIT and I asked the wonderful person who handles that area for the form
to fill out she said I will send it to you and you fill it out electronically. A lot
of forms today are electronic. Announcements by the way in many cases you mail out a piece
of paper but in most cases it is e mail that we are getting. E mail has really replaced
most of the communication we do in offices. Now I call this category stationery. You can
call it whatever you want. Invitations are still here. People still mail out invitations.
Although I got an e vite the other day for my granddaughter's birthday. I am a grandparent,
but don't I deserve a printed invitation? Birthday packages or party packages, when
I get to her birthday there will be a banner in her house. It will say Happy Birthday and
it will say Lucy and it will have Dora the Explorer on them and little brochures of various
kinds, cups. All of this stuff will be subsidized by the biggest suckers on earth known as grandparents.
This is where the money is. Because we will spend any amount of money on our grandchildren.
If you are in the printing business why the ability to print on weird shaped materials
gets you in to this marketplace. Business cards, growing. Exponentially. Why?
Because we change jobs and titles on a regular basis. Your company color changes, your logo
changes and you can buy them online for $10. I remember the days many years ago in a little
print shop and I would spend two hours with somebody on a $24 business card job. This
is ridiculous. But the world we are in today you can do it very quickly. They are printed
by digital and you can get them virtually overnight. So you don't see engraved stationery
or engraved envelopes anymore, but you still see business cards on a regular basis. Of
course, the major market for print, the one that will never go away is packaging. Now
most people don't realize this. But paper was invented not to print on. It was invented
to hold things. The Chinese invented paper so they could put things in it like seeds
and then wrap it and hold it. It was a holding mechanism if you will. Later on someone figured
they could put images on it as well. The packaging market is growing by leaps and bounds mainly
because of the number of brands. When I was a kid it was Coke. Now there are 30 versions
of Coke. Diet Coke, Diet Cherry Coke. Eventually they will have Frank's Cherry Vanilla Coke.
So the label market, the tag market is growing. Labels, of course, mainly because of the growth
of the bottled water. Who would have thought that bottled water was a major market. If
you wanted water you went to the sink and you drank water. Tags are important mostly
for security reasons, in order to verify that whatever the thing is an actual specialized
kind of a clothing or whatever. Folding carton, another folding carton is changing now to
blends of both paper and plastic. Flexible packaging, we are moving to the point where
we can actually print photographs on flexible packaging to satisfy (inaudible). Corrugated,
a lot of the big box stores they print on the corrugated. Test packaging, some supermarkets
where there is special areas just to test your reaction to different logos and different
colors, different packaging and different formats to see how you react to it. It is
very scientific in the way they design packages today. So this is a phenomenal growth in the
marketplace. Miscellaneous, if you send in a question and
say Frank, you left out this, I am going to say it is in miscellaneous. Greeting cards
are in here. I have an objection to all of you who sent me an e greeting card this year.
Stop it. I don't want them anymore. This year I got half as many greeting cards at the holidays
than I did in the past. What I got with e greeting cards. Sorry, guys, it may be cheaper
for you but it doesn't have the same reaction. Overall greeting cards are down 15% because
of that. Wrapping paper is still there. The person who invented the bag where you put
the thing in it and you put tissue paper, I love that idea. Calendars, calendar books,
they are still printed. Posters if you have high school kids you know what I am talking
about. This category has seen its ups and downs but it is still there.
Now the growth in printing is coming in areas that we never dreamed of. You have got printing
on textiles, printing on plastics, printing on glass, printed electronics of various kinds.
The second picture on the bottom from the left they printed the cloth on the chair to
match the wallpaper. In the third one over from the left they printed carpet to look
like stone. The last one on the right, I love the RIT logo, that's not glass. That's printed
plastic that looks like stained glass, although you can print on glass. So you say wait, Frank,
the printing industry. This is not the printing industry. Yes, it is the printing industry.
Take the printed electronics area. When we figure out, we can print a battery and print
a circuitry, we can print a screen, when we can print all of that, including the content
and put it on a package, so your box of Wheaties sings and dances and it is going to open a
phenomenal marketplace. And what difference does it make whether I print on glass and
sell it to someone. I print on paper and sell it to someone. What difference does the substrate
make. Many of us in the printing industry make a lot of money printing on plastic. That's
been a growth area. Why not print on heavy plastic or print on glass or print on metal
or print on worn. The market is there. So you look at printed electronics. We are printing
display screens. OLEDs, the screen on your cell phone is printed. We are printing batteries.
We are printing billboards with OLED, and we are printing logic and memory. And by the
way we are doing (inaudible) and now they are starting to figure out a way to do it
with digital printing of all kinds. So the question is what is the printing industry
anymore? Think of the overlapping categories from commercial to inlap, to coffee shop.
You are all overlapping because you are doing what everyone else does. Commercial printers
are printing packages. It used to be quick printers only did small jobs. Now they have
digital printing. They are doing color jobs. Among all of the categories of the printing
industry is common technology and converters in industrial printing where you have all
this specialty stuff done and it is now starting to migrate over to the commercial side. Even
newspapers are discovering that circulations are going down and they are starting to come
in to the realm of wall fed high speed ink jet at this stage of the game.
So all these business sectors of the printing industry are now competing with every other
business sector. So once you decide to move in this new world now it is all about workflow.
Getting it from the marketing side and creative side to the business side to all the prep
work that has to be done, getting it in to whatever the printing process and printers
are going to wind up with a multitude of printing processes including electronic systems and
how we are going to distribute it, by shipping by mail and by handout and we have to bill
it. We don't do that well enough anymore. So the key to all this technology is how do
I get it from the mind of someone who wants to do it to the actual finished product. So
the new world we are in it is a printing world and a mobile and social media world and an
online world and that's what we are in. It is no longer it is not print or it is print
and because the electronic world and the print world are going to work together as we move
in to the future. I am right on time at this stage of the game.
>> RON GOLDBERG: We have a few questions already. The first question, if you were just starting
out would you start a magazine today? And if so, how would the launch of the magazine
be different than what you did in the past in your other publications?
>> FRANK ROMANO: That's a great question. I am doing a class in April here on how to
start a magazine. There is still a market for magazines but you have to find the market.
You are not by the way you are not going to do a general business magazine. That's a diminishing
marketplace. What you have to do is find a niche. Remember when personal computers first
came out there was a magazine called PC for PC users. There was a magazine called Macworld
for Mac users. If you had a Macintosh, you bought this magazine because it kept you informed
about the Macintosh. You want to find a niche where people are not communicating to people.
Start a magazine for 3D printing. Find a new technology where there is no communication
in the field. Now you come up with the idea. Now the next thing is where do you find the
list to promote it. That's the next big thing. It used to be you could buy a list from a
magazine. They don't sell that much anymore. They don't want to give that away. You have
to go to list brokers and find a list that would allow you to promote to sell circular
subscriptions, so what the publication is. And then the next question, the third and
most important question who will advertise in it. So if you can find a base of people
who want to reach the circulation that you have defined, then you can start to sell ads
and that's where the money is by the way. You are selling blank paper and you are putting
ink on it and you are charging a premium for that. So good idea. Great list. Find the advertisers.
There is still a market for magazines. And by the way, you ready for this, over a thousand
new magazines start every year in the United States.
>> RON GOLDBERG: Great. A few questions about speaking about specifically 3D printing and
2D and 3D printing are merging and other questions on your thoughts of 3D printing.
>> FRANK ROMANO: A few years ago I was trying to create a program called Graphic Media and
the graphic design school said I couldn't use graphic. Now 3D printing is coming out
and every part of RIT is getting in to it. Wait a minute, guys, don't I own the word
"printing"? We are doing it in the engineering school. We are doing it in the design school.
Because 3D printing crosses almost every category that you can imagine. Biomedical. Printing
medicine. We are printing body parts. We can print skin for graphs. We can print prototypes.
We can print parts. So we have now got one a 3D printer in the school and we are getting
a second one momentarily. And we are starting new courses in that and again we are going
to find our niche. It will not be overlapping many of the other areas but try to find new
things that we can do with 3D printing that tie in to the industry because it is a growth
opportunity. I read a few months ago that the UPS stores were going to and some of the
stores are going to install 3D printers and are going to give you the 3D software so you
can design something and then go to the UPS store and then print it out. I mean think
about this future that's coming. They have got 3D printers so inexpensive, under a thousand
dollars and you can buy it and put it at home and output toys, all kinds of applications
there. 3D printing is going to be the growth marketplace. And what we have to figure out
where are the opportunities for the printing industry, because they are not apparent at
this stage. Where are we going to be able to make money in this world.
>> RON GOLDBERG: Okay. Any other questions? >> FRANK ROMANO: I see little notes up there
every now and then. I see somebody agrees on the e greeting cards. Thank you very much.
Appreciate that. I don't know who you are, Martha, but that's a nice note.
>> RON GOLDBERG: Martha who lives in Rhode Island who you met a few years ago.
>> FRANK ROMANO: By the way we have had a nice group of people and we have only lost
three or four of you in the last hour. So that's pretty good. Most of you are eating
lunch or taking a nap at this point. (Laughter)
>> FRANK ROMANO: It is great to have you on and I know you are all alumni. And I hope
you are all doing well. >> RON GOLDBERG: How robust is the relationship
with print and mobile? >> FRANK ROMANO: Ahh. It is not robust. It
is just growing. You don't know quite how to do it. That's part of the problem. The
size of the screen because you can't see everything easily on the screen getting in to different
printers it has to be wireless. There is a lot going on. In fact, Adobe, one of my friends
there is taking a lot of control over that whole area. How is it going to handle that.
Once you have a pdf file how will I get it to a large number of printout devices that
are out there. By the way a lot of activity on the iPad and on the tablets because they
are a little more robust on what they do in the screen. Over time we are going to want
to print things out and what is going to happen you will go in to a hotel lobby and you will
be able to print out your boarding pass and a document that has to be signed. How many
cases you go to a registry or some place and they want you to sign something and they send
you the pdf file and now your problem is getting in to a printer.
>> RON GOLDBERG: Let's take another question, print on demand market and online self publishing
market. >> FRANK ROMANO: Print on demand has been
the growth market over the last decade. If you order a book from Amazon and they said
it is going to take five days to get to you, it is being printed on demand. At some point
that book will go out of print but it is still printed on demand. So that's still a growing
marketplace. More and more companies are in to it. Here in Rochester called center has
pioneered, with color printing in almost every way you can imagine. So that marketplace is
a growth market and will continue in various ways. So all digital printing is growing at
this stage of the game and I don't see any major changes. Now your self publishing is
going to continue because everyone wants to publish their own book and their own something.
And that market will always be out there in some way, shape or form.
>> RON GOLDBERG: There is a question about print brokers and whether they still have
strong positions today or are more customers going to direct printers.
>> FRANK ROMANO: One third of all of the listings on the Yellow Pages under printing are brokers.
You don't know that by the way. You have to go and visit the address there and see if
there is actually a printing company there and the odds are there aren't. Who are the
brokers? This is very interesting. We have lost 50% of the printers in America. They
are gone. Now they didn't go out of business, but what they did is they merged with another
printer and one of the owners or multiple owners of one of those plants became a broker
to the company they merged with. That's why there are so many brokers today. They are
independent and they can use almost any printer. There are printing companies out there that
deal with only brokers at this stage. And so I see a lot of activity in the broker community
at this stage. And in fact, by the way if you think about it, the printing services
capabilities Xerox and Kodak and HP they will have a division that will come in and manage
your print services and they buy printing for you. So they are in essence print brokers.
So a lot of activities in print brokers today. >> RON GOLDBERG: There is a question about
whether it is hard for people to go from print to online versus more of a seamless interaction
from e mail or a digital ad like on Pandora. >> FRANK ROMANO: You are absolutely right.
This is a major problem. If you create I just did doing a book of mine in design and the
problem is you wanted to do the print version and wanted to do the electronic version and
I thought the electronic version was a no brainer. I have seen a demo and it looked
easy. Once you get in to it lots of details you have to get in to. Going back and forth
from the print world and the electronic world there is still a lot there that has to be
done. Pdf is great but pdf is limited in many respects in terms of e books. It doesn't give
you all the features you want. We have the specialization because the e book for a Kindle
is different than a book for the iPad. >> RON GOLDBERG: It is great to hear an enthusiastic
printer supporter. Is RIT offering any classes in industrial applications, in particular
printing on textiles? >> FRANK ROMANO: The answer is no. We should.
We are trying to revive out outreach seminar programs. Many years ago we had tons of seminars
of print buyers and that's how many of you learned about digital printing by coming to
those seminars and that marketplace went down. Why? Webinars. So we are looking at trying
to revive that and if we do that's a major area to get in to.
>> RON GOLDBERG: Now there are marketing components that expend printing.
>> FRANK ROMANO: A printer is not a printer anymore. They are an extension of your marketing
department. So many people create something and they say just print it. You should deal
with the printer before you start the project. Because the printer can help you determine
how you might be able to repurpose some of that information. There is some great software
packages that can take some of the print material and repurpose it for social media and get
it in to e mail and extend your marketing reach significantly from one file. But if
you really wait until you have a print file it is a little bit too late. You want to do
it at the beginning of the project. >> RON GOLDBERG: We will squeeze in the last
question really quickly, utilizing direct mail product. How valuable is retrieving data
from campaigns? And is that is an opportunity to upsell marketing campaigns.
>> FRANK ROMANO: The biggest problem today is data. Where do we get the data, variable
data from marketing and how do we save it and use it. Because of so much interest in
privacy and security it is getting harder and harder to do this. Without the data we
can't do a good job on marketing. So we really need to have more activity on how we extend
marketing information in to promotional campaigns. >> RON GOLDBERG: Great. That's all the time
we have for today. Additional questions could be e mailed to ritalum@rit.edu or Tweeted
to @RIT_Alumni with the hashtag #meRITwebinars and we will direct your questions to Frank Romano.