I just finished watching a webcast discussing the evolution of printing in the digital age. The discussion really centered around the fact that people seem to be printing less in the age of Web 2.0. People read blogs, watch videos, communicate with each other, check prices, and order products online.
The proposed solution was to produce prints faster and more economically to entice people to print more. A field research film was used as a sort of test market for what people actually want to print. From this video it seems that people would like to print blogs, recipes, emails, and photos. The interviewees also said that it’s hard to print web content because of banners, graphics, ads, and navigation that is really irrelevant on a printed page.
For the most part the problems with printing web pages are in the developers hands. Web developers need to take the time to develop print friendly style sheets, and use standards based pages to make the printing process painless for readers and avoid creating “printer friendly” duplicate pages. CSS is a wonderful thing, and developers need to figure that out and use it to their advantage. (Note to self…finish that print ready style sheet for this site.)
There are things that I want to print to keep, and things that I just need to take with me away from the screen; a Fandango print out, photographs, and an occasional reference document. Other than those few cases, I try to print as little as possible. It just seems wasteful to me. Not only does it cost me money for paper and ink, it cost me money by taking up space in my recycling bin. If I’m going to use it once and “throw it away”, did I really need to print it in the first place? My preferences for printing seem to be right inline with the people in the video.
While some people have portable electronic devices to meet some of these needs, like directions, or reading email remotely, some things are not conducive to portable devices, like plans for a wood working project, or a recipe…messy. Nobody wants sauce in their iPod.
What if someone were to develop re-printable paper? What if you could produce paper that would only hold pigment for 24 hours or so, ink that would evaporate after a limited amount of time. Or inks that were not light fast, so that they would fade after some time, or even get erased as they went through the printer. Maybe a UV bulb that would wipe the page as it was re-fed into the printer. Obviously this would be a limited re-use, as paper would become wrinkled or worn so that it couldn’t be used indefinitely.
Would this make financial sense for a company to produce as a consumer product? Well you could charge the same amount for the ink, maybe more. The paper could be of heavier stock, to be more durable and a bit more expensive. You could even make the pages print faster to make customer flock to the technology and print more because they felt OK about printing on self-recycling paper. I know I’d feel better about printing Google maps directions if I had something like this.