The death of the printed word has been long-heralded, especially since the rise of the internet. Almost every science fiction film ever made has us reading our daily newspsaper from a device, not a paper page. The future, in all its glory, will make paper redundant.
So why have paper sales increased steadily since the internet's introduction?
It seems that the very mechanism that should be driving nails into paper's coffin (or recycling bin) is helping it survive, albeit at the expense of commercial printers.
The truth is that someday we may well see the end of print, but we have a long way to go first. Not least, we need to see cheap, pervasive devices that make information available everywhere, and that make reading text as comfortable as reading from paper. We are still many years from this dream. Sorry trees.
In the meantime, the internet is fuleing a new phenomenon: personal, relevant printing.
Today, we print more and more in our homes, and at our desks. Where we once called for the brochure, we now visit the web page. And more often than not, we print it. So instead of printing being a centralised, high volume activity, it is becoming a low volume activity that takes place in millions of locations.
In theory, this is a far more efficient use of paper: find the relevant page of information, like a holiday destination, then print it. No need for the other 200 pages of irrelevant paper. It's win-win: information owner spends less on print; consumer gets exactly what they need, instantly.
In practice, more pages are printed because people can actually find the information they need today, whereas in the past they would have accepted partial information over the phone, or lived in blissful ignorance. So in truth, the internet, in empowering people's access to information (and vastly increasing the quantity of information available) is simply altering the printing process. Web pages are now master files that we print from, not just pages we view on screen.
Which begs the question: why do most websites print out so poorly?
This is a serious issue, yet it is largely overlooked by owners and designers of websites. For the most part, a printed page from a website will be poorly formated by traditional print standards, and in many cases will lack much of the brand personality that the brand owner has worked so hard to build in other ways. The attitude has typically been: 'well that's what a web page looks like when it's printed'. The happy acceptance of such poor printed output is astounding. A print-out might sit on a desk for days after the site it came from has been left behind. A shoddy print-out is not exactly a great lasting impression of the organisation it represents.
There are many ways of addressing this issue, and it may have little to do with the design of the site itself.
The experience of consuming information from a PC screen differs greatly from that of paper. We have to consider each on its own merits and think carefully about how to deliver the best experience in each medium. (and we've not even touched on devices like handhelds).
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