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By Kevin Keane, IAPHC CEO Our Digital Manifest Destiny? "...one of the paradoxes of the communications industry is that, while fewer corporate giants now own more media, the Internet and digital technology offer consumer more choices." Ken Auletta, in the Talk of the Town, The New Yorker magazine November 8, 1999. In the printing and graphics arts arena it is apparently a certainty, that due to consolidation a few corporate giants may own more of the available printing and graphic arts plants under one corporate umbrella. But it is manifest destiny that the Internet and digital technology are offering clients more choices and not all of the choices are to continue to do business with traditional printers. Today, 11 November 1999, a webcast event is being held to teach the interactive participants how to use the Internet to achieve dramatic savings and cycle time reduction in print procurement. The webcast is being sponsored by the GartnerGroup, Impresse Corporation and Hewlett Packard. Note several points from previous issues of TMN: 1) We said last week that commercial printers are becoming more like quick printers in client demands for while-you-wait printing. (i.e., cycle time reductions) 2) Several months ago, we quoted Rab Govil, president of the Print On Demand Initiative (PODi) who said his research in many Fortune 500 firms found that the process of buying printing is one task those rather key clients dreaded. A painful process is an unacceptable cost of doing business that any savvy Fortune 500 firm would seek to eliminate or at least reduce. 3) We keep harping on the fact that the printers most likely to survive the manifest destiny of Internet and digital technologies are those who employ Information Technology (IT) and MIS people as the critical team members in delivering a printing company's mission. Which may no longer be merely printing. 4) We also have been noting that two key players who have joined Heidelberg and the other big iron vendors and thus help determine the future shape of 'printing equipment' are Xerox and Hewlett Packard. Now, note who is sponsoring this webcast. The ad for the webcast makes a few interesting points: A) Globally, 10,000 companies spend up to 2 - 3% of REVENUES on printed material. B) Paper is still the primary communications media with customers, partners, vendors and field service reps. C) Paper consumption is growing at 3 - 5 % a year. D) Until recently, there was no process to streamline corporate print procurement and dramatically reduce costs. A printer reading points A through C might say :"Hey, cool, printing is still a healthy growing market!" It is point D that worries us however. As if to cement this worry, we offer TrendWatch Fast Fact 53, which was released on Tuesday, 9 November 1999: "Business conditions for commercial printers are headed South just after the millennium according to the newly created TrendWatch Business Condition Index -- which is at the lowest level since the start of data collection for the Index over five years ago....In 1996 the threat that dollars would be shifting from print budgets to new media was just that, a threat. Now for many print buyers, this is a realistic choice, and cross-media publishing is growing to be more commonplace, affecting budgets, new jobs, page counts, reprint cycles and other print job characteristics." Point D -- the rise of 'other' processes for Print Procurement Impresse.com is not only one of the sponsors of today's webcast, it is one of the several, (actually one of a whole bunch of outfits) promising to streamline print procurement. On 9 November, Atlanta based MarketingCentral.com announced a super site designed to meet the needs of the entire marketing spectrum -- advertising, public relations, graphic design, direct mail and creative and printing professionals. From the news release we quote: "MarketingCentral's many business applications enable marketers to distribute documents and press releases, manage projects and tasks, purchase advertising space, research media databases and conduct Convention calls and Webinars.....MarketingCentral also provides resources including databases listing printers, freelancers and graphic designers..." Visit www.marketingcentral.com Meanwhile in the last TMN we offered our high praise for the good folks at Collabria who, at least, 'used to be a printner.' On Tuesday, 9 November, Collabria, Inc announced that the company will market Collabria PrintCommerce e-business service for printers, print resellers and print buyers through the Ariba Network business-to-business e-commerce platform. Collabria has joined Ariba Supplier Links, an Ariba designed supplier partner initiative to make goods and services readily available via the Internet. Alan Hu, president of Collabria said: "Collabria's print supply chain solution enhances Ariba's enterprise commerce and procurement services with significant print production and management savings." There is a trend at work here gentle reader. You can ignore the buzz words, but don't ignore the trend. E-Books; The Electric Slide Last Thursday, Microsoft announced a deal with R.R. Donnelley and Sons under which the printing powerhouse will work closely with its publishing partners to convert print titles into electronic versions that conform to the Open eBook specification. Microsoft's Reader software will thus be able to be used to view Donnelley's thousands of titles. We told you about Microsoft's ClearType project in the 7 September issue of TMN: "His mission has been to increase the resolution on an L.C.D. computer screen from eighty-eight pixel dots to three hundred per inch. Words on the screen will therefore look the way words do on paper, spurring advances in electronic books and maybe in online reading." Mr. Softie hopes that ClearType will help drive the use of Microsoft Reader. Donnelley has also agreed to develop an e-book repository where the titles it converts can be stored and ordered up by booksellers on request. Microsoft has been avidly courting other publishing houses having recently bagged deals with Bertelsmann, HarperCollins, Penguin Putnam, Simon & Schuster and TimeWarner. And as mentioned in last week's TMN, Xerox has recently inked a deal to work with Bertelsmann to develop ways to print books on demand from orders from the Internet. In an online article by CNET's Greg Sandoval datelined 9 November, one finds more interest in the phenomenon of e-books: "The e-book market has come alive thanks to deals from Microsoft and behemoth bookseller Barnes & Noble that could help to popularize a technology that has so far lingered on the sideline. Microsoft and others claim reader technology has improved drastically. Still, it may be some time before consumers drop their printed books in favor of electronic replacements, analysts said." However, there are other players seeking to build momentum in the e-Book market. On 8 November, Adobe Systems announced a joint effort with Reciprocal to enable publishers to secure content for distribution and sale via the Internet. Their cooperation is expected to benefit end-users interested in purchasing and downloading business reports, books, articles and analyst reports many of which are not currently available due to copyright protection concerns among publishers. Adobe participated in a Reciprocal's recent pilot project along with Houghton Mifflin to digitally distribute educational courseware at SUNY Buffalo. Our thanks to Milt Vine in Seattle, Martie Hughes in Buffalo, John Kohnke in San Francisco, John Berthelsen in Madison and Lesley Addy in Ottawa for providing items of grist for our TMN mill. Your items are welcomed, please send them to kkeane1069@aol.com Other Industry Tidbits On 29 October, Unisource said it had reached an agreement with PrintNation.com to sell Unisource's line of products online at PrintNation.com which bills itself as the world's largest printing equipment and supplies store. Meanwhile Day International announced in early November that it had completed its previously announced acquistion of Varn International. Day's CEO Dennis Wolter's said: "We have had great success with our offset blankets and sleeve products. Varn has had similar success with their press room chemical products. We decided to partner with Varn so both product lines could benefit from aggressive technology development and well established market positions." Another Consolidator has weighed in. Nationwide Graphics, Inc., (based in Houston, Texas, as is Consolidated Graphics, hmmmm) picked up two more companies and has now bought eight firms in 15 months. The most recent deals are in Miami, Florida and in Houston. We find it interesting that Nationwide refers to its deals as "annexing" the target firms. Master Graphics Inc., another of the consolidators we have often covered in these pages, announced on 8 November, that it had retained the investment banking firms of Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette and Prudential Securities to explore opportunities to maximize shareholder value. We mentioned the unveiling of the Eastman Kodak Digital Copier printer at Graph Expo in last week's TMN. Heidelberg showed it as the Digimaster 9110, while Danka showed it as the DigiSource 9110 at Xplor '99 in Los Angeles earlier this month. Canon was also at Xplor '99 the imageRUNNER 110; and IBM showed its InfoPrint2000, which unlike some its its predecessors in the InfoPrint line, is a fine unit. Both the Canon and IBM machines are also built on the Kodak DigiSource 9110 engine.
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