Spread the word – guys like kit. Whether salivating over a Bugatti Veyron, considering refinancing their mortgage to pay for a new TAG Heuer chronograph with close consecutive times register and tachometer scale, or spec’ing out a 12-unit long perfector to hit 18,000sph, there is something very male about flashy gadgetry. So it’s little wonder that when e-paper (the kind of coated grade The Stig would procure) got it’s first major commercial outing, it was on the front cover of a men’s magazine.
US magazine Esquire is equipping the September issue with an electronic display on the front cover. Like the limited edition £840,000, 1,000bhp monster Bugatti, the e-paper front page is so expensive that the E Ink display has been limited to 100,000 of the total run of 720,000. Esquire editor-in-chief David Granger was not one to downplay his achievement, calling the special edition cover a response to the print industry’s "lack of progress" since the nineteenth century.
And here’s me thinking the invention of offset lithography, desktop publishing, computer to plate, digital printing, and even the PUR binding that holds Esquire together, were all examples of progress in print. Apparently not.
Perhaps Granger could be accused of bluster and bravado. He is American, after all. But there’s also some truth in his statement. Back at the dawn of the new millennium, in those halcyon days of my youth at university in Brisbane, Queensland, I wrote a paper on electronic ink, and how it was about to revolutionise publishing and sound that long-postulated death knell of print everyone keeps banging on about.
Why has commercial e-paper taken so long to materialise? I think it is a case of ‘technological determinism’, an academic theory that once handed me a knock-out blow at the end of 12 rounds of ego-posturing intellectual sparring in the campus refectory (yes, Queenslanders can do intellectual debate, even when trying to focus on standing in line for a meat pie at the tuckshop).
The phrase comes from the academic idea that society’s technology determines its values, structure or history. Basically, do we invent a piece of technology to fulfil a need or do we invent new needs because technology can fulfil them? Did the dotcom bust of the early 21st century occur because we weren’t yet interested in running our businesses and living our lives online, or was it that the sub-standard technology and snail’s pace dial-up connections couldn’t provide us with a viable model for the e-commerce and social networking that is now so prevalent? In a print context, you could ask the same kind of chicken-or-egg question: Is variable-data print a growth area because the market has long demanded personalisation, or is it because digital print technology can now offer variable information?
I was talking to Xerox’s monochrome expert Malcolm Glynn yesterday, who said there is a huge upturn in demand for black-and-white print. Glynn says he’s suddenly having conversations about quality of digital B&W for the first time in about eight years and thinks B&W will be an integral part of the fledgling transpromo market. Rather than purely market demand, it seems that technological developments, such as flash fusing to rapidly dry high-resolution toner-based B&W prints, have helped put high-quality monochrome back on the agenda.
Printing World’s Amy Golding will be looking at print buyers’ understanding of digital print for our September issue (alas, no e-paper cover). She has found that many print buyers, and moreover the marketing departments behind them, aren’t clued up to the new applications offered by digital print. I was chatting with Real Digital International’s sales and marketing director Andy Ruddle, who echoed these sentiments with a story about a recent job for a high-profile publisher. It was up to Real Digital to explain how the technology of digital could help determine the overall approach Ruddle's customer took to its campaign, rather than just discussing prices and run lengths. Xerox says it is having similar conversations with marketing departments to show them the capabilities of digital.
How many printers are also having these types of conversations with their clients? It’s not enough to just talk about economic short runs or personalising a piece of print with the recipient’s name – digital technology offers so much more. There's a real opportunity to get closer to your customer while winning more high-value work thanks to the functions of modern digital equipment.
As gadget-obsessed guys would accept, it’s not just important to brag about the time-keeping accuracy of your TAG watch, but also the 17 extra functions, including the choice to synchronise with time zones in New York, Sydney or the Mars landing site and the fact it tells you the current temperature in the Mariana Trench. It's not just important to brag about your digital press, but all its extra functions and applications you could offer customers. Spread the word upstream about the power of print.