Nobody said that the stock market has to be rational. Nevertheless the few remaining publicly-listed UK print companies must be feeling more than a little exasperated at the moment.

Take Printing.com, the print franchise firm which has posted pre-tax profits well in excess of £2m for the last two years. Following its recent announcement that its latest profits should meet expectations (forecasts range up to £2.5m), there was barely a sneeze in its share price.

Now I’m not suggesting that a buying frenzy should have been in order, but if I was Tony Rafferty (chief executive of the Manchester-based firm) I might have expected more of an upwards movement than the 1.2% rise that this revelation elicited.

Bear in mind we’re talking about the same firm whose shares, with a 7.3% yield and an 8.5% prospective return, “offer a better rate than most high-street savings accounts”, according to a recent article in The Independent.

Not convinced? What about St Ives then, whose interim results showed a £14m increase in revenue, despite the “challenging market conditions” in which the firm has been operating. How did its shares react to this news and the equally welcome £1.8m rise in pre-tax profits (to £12.5m)? In actual fact they fell. That is to say, they rose from 237p to 243p on the 31 March (when the results were published) and have subsequently fallen to 230.5p.

Perhaps investors are fearful of some sort of post-Potter malaise setting in at Clays, the company’s Bungay-based subsidiary. After all, JK Rowling’s ludicrously popular seven-book series has been a print and publishing phenomenon, and has no doubt been hugely beneficial to both Clays and Bloomsbury.

Nevertheless, one would have thought that St Ives acquisition of SP Group, together with its recent mammoth Royal Mail contract win, would be enough to convince would-be doubters that there is considerably more substance to the firm’s success than there is to Ms Rowling’s novels.

Perhaps print just isn’t in vogue anymore? Well, what of print management then – once the darling of private equity and the city alike. Profit margins aren’t what they once were in this much maligned sector, but try telling that to Communisis. In its latest full-year figures, published in February, Communisis posted a 472% increase in profit – after restructuring costs – to £10.5m.

Chief executive Steve Vaughan was “pleased with the results”, as he had every right to be. Shareholders on the other hand, weren’t. Since publication of its FY 2007 figures, the company’s share price has fallen over 12%, to 63.25p. The days of print management may not be over, but apparently the days of investing in it are.

Finally, there’s TripleArc, whose share price bounced along at around the 3p mark for the best part of two-and-a-half years (pretty much regardless of its results) until yesterday, when rumours of a buyout caused a sudden surge. The buyer has since been revealed as Office2Office (O2O), who put in a 6p per share offer this morning.

Chief executive Jason Cromack has said that the deal would provide “certainty and value” for shareholders and he must be privately praying that O2O’s stakeholders approve the acquisition and rescue TripleArc from the vagaries of the stock market.

The alternative – a rapid return to the 3p mark for TripleArc’s shares – doesn’t bear thinking about. Because if a 472% jump in profits isn’t enough to raise a tent in the stock market’s unusually-conservative trousers, then what are the odds of TripleArc escaping from the basement without some M&A stimulation?

Not very high, it would seem.

 Within days of its UK release, I saw a man on the tube proudly playing with his shiny new iPhone in a manner guaranteed to attract attention. So far, so what, you might say. Well, I know this might appear to have nought to do with print, but to borrow from Buddy Ackerman, “Try to follow me, because I’m gonna be moving in a kind of circular motion, so if you pay attention, there will be a point!”
 
Back to Mr I-have-an-iPhone. Let’s call him Bob for the sake of ease. So here sits Bob all Armani-suited, Blahnik-booted, and generally adorned with the trappings of success (albeit ruined somewhat by the fact he is squeezed between a rowdy drunk and a football hooligan). Not for Bob the surreptitious selecting of tracks, tweaking of volume, or setting of reminders that one might expect from someone in public possession of a highly-nickable item, no. Bob has an iPhone and damned if he ain’t gonna let everyone know it. Why? Because an iPhone is more than a phone. It is more than an MP3 player. It is more than your own portable gateway to the internet. It is cool.
 
There, my friends, lies the rub. Apple, who spent so long struggling against the might and ubiquity of Microsoft, one day hit upon the key to success. It isn’t speed, or functionality, or ease of use, and as Windows demonstrated it sure-as-hell isn’t reliability. The key is cool. And for all its expertise and history in the world of computing, it wasn’t through the increasingly-popular Macintosh range that Apple discovered this great secret. It was with the iPod.
 
Hands up who has one? And, while we’re at it, hands up who owned a digital audio player before the iPod came along? They were around for long enough, having first appeared in 1998, about three years before the first iPod cropped up and five years before the launch of iTunes (which proved a tipping point in iPod sales). Here’s another question: why did you buy an iPod? (And try not to use the word cool in your response!)
 
The scary thing about the iPod is that it gained cult status without being the best in its field. It was innovative, fun and cool, but it didn’t have the best functionality. Apple noticed this, as witnessed by the iPod’s influence on the design of the subsequent generation of iMac’s, and they’re not about to forget. Others sat up and took notice too and if you still think this has nothing to do with print, just wait till Apple makes a concerted effort to get into the e-book market.
 
For all its functionality, despite the fact it intelligently uses e-paper instead of a garish LCD display, and regardless of whether or not it allows you to download more-or-less any book, within a minute, anywhere within the Sprint EV-DO high speed wireless data network, Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader will not change the face of print. Why? Because it’s ugly.
 
E-books, in this increasingly environmentally-conscious world, are the future. Don’t doubt it. Not in their current format, granted, but in some, as-yet-unreleased, innovative, fun, cool design, they will be a huge success. Polymer Vision is currently working on the Readius, an e-reader with a flexible screen that weighs little more than a mobile phone and, unlike the Kindle, which only works in the US, the Readius will be available pretty-much worldwide. Will it prove the turning point? Probably not, although it does offer an innovative new twist on existing designs and might pave the way for e-reader periodicals.
 
I’m not saying that we’re on the verge of a surge in e-reader popularity and subsequent decline in book sales, because we aren’t. However, it would be foolish not to keep an eye on developments in the e-book market. Admittedly there is a sentimentality about books that didn’t exist to the same extent with CDs (although it does interestingly with LPs), and so it is unlikely that any shift from the printed paperback to the downloaded e-book will be as sudden, or have as dramatic an effect, as the shift to digital music has been and has had. Furthermore, you may think that all the added functionality and environmental benefits in the world would not convince book buyers and sellers to switch from the trusty paperback to the alternative electronic medium. You may be right. However, if book printers should be wary of one thing more than any other, it is that cool factor. That and Steve Jobs