The Displacement of Print: The Impact of Electronic Media On The Paper Industry, 2010-2020

paper > e-book
The Displacement of Print

The Impact of Electronic Media
on the Paper Industry, 2010-2020
WWW.PIRA-INTERNATIONAL.COM
This report aims to gauge the extent to which print
and paper are going to be displaced by some form of
electronic media by 2020.
The Displacement of Print
Richard Romano
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table of contents
Executive Summary
The Changing Media Landscape
Drivers and Barriers for Electronic Displacement
Enabling and Disabling Technologies
Impact on Paper: Outlook to 2020
Displacement Conclusions
Introduction and Methodology
Introduction
Do Not Print
Objective and Scope
Methodology
Introduction
Consumer Demographics
Advertising and Marketing Trends
Social Media
Mobile
Publishing Trends
Corporate Communications
Drivers and Barriers for Electronic
Displacement
Introduction
Consumer Technology Adoption Trends
Publishing Trends
4Magazines
4Newspapers
4Catalogs
Text to Rich Media
E-book Developments
Introduction
Enablers
4Internet
4Search
4Broadband/WiFi
4Cloud Computing
4RFID
Media Enablers
4Web Sites
4E-Mail
4Blogs
4RSS
4Podcast
4Social Media
4Video
4Geolocation
Electronic Device Enablers
4E-Readers and E-books
4Smartphones
4Tablet Computers
Display Enablers
4Flexible Displays
43D Displays
Disablers
4Print On Demand
4Printed Electronics
4Quick Response (QR)
4Augmented Reality (AR)
Introduction
Books
Catalogs
Directories
Magazines
Newspapers
Legal, Financial
Manuals and Technical Documents
Advertising
4Signage
4Direct Mail
Commercial Printing
Ofce Stationery
Security Printing
Printed Packaging
Printed Labels
Conclusions
List of Tables and Figures
3 4 5
2
1
paper > e-book > the displacement of print
4
CHAPTER ES 1 2 3 4 5 TOC
Is there any traditional print application around that isnt
threatened to be supplanted by an electronic alternative at any
minute? Every day, it seems, a story hits the headlines extolling
some new application of electronic media. For example, I recently
read that an upscale restaurant in the U.S. has begun handing out
its wine list on Apple iPads. Can the full menu be far behind?
We often think of paper and printing in terms of obvious
applicationsdirect mail, magazines and newspapers, and so on.
The predicted electronic displacement of these items has been well
documentedand will continue to be throughout this report. But
what about smaller, stealth print and paper applications such as
the aforementioned wine lists and menus?
Is paper as a medium for conveying content in danger of
extinction? And if it does not become extinct, then how endangered
might it get? What are the forces at work that make extinction a
viable possibility to ponder, and, conversely, what are the forces
that could keep print from falling over the brink? Where will paper
be in the year 2020?
Technology is obviously the major driver in the transition away from
paper, though another important inuence is peoples changing
attitude toward paper itself. In fact, paper is often regarded as
an unmitigated environmental evil. In the United States, for
example, it is common to see appended to the signature les
of e-mail messages the admonishment Please think about the
environment before printing this message. And, a 2009 New York
Times blog post that asked, Are E-Readers Greener than Books?
cited a study that reported that e-book readers such as the Amazon
Kindle have less of an environmental impact than printed books,
as if electronic media didnt have a carbon cost. Of course printed
books require paper, which means that trees do get cut downbut
trees are a renewable resource after all. Conversely, electronic
media run on electricity that is produced, often, from coal and
other nonrenewable fossil fuels. And how many rst- and second-
generation Kindles (and their ilk) are going to end up in landlls
in the next few years? And, unlike paper, there is no possibility
of these electronic devices biodegrading. Depending on the
batteries they contain, the devices may also leach toxins into the
groundwater.
So the environmental impact of paper vs. pixels is hardly clear-cut,
but it is one of the driving attitudes toward the displacement of
print and paper.
This report, then, aimsin a hybrid quantitative/qualitative
wayto gauge the extent to which print and paper are going to
be displaced by some form of electronic media by 2020. There
are, however, two ways that this displacement is occurring: The
rst is by direct replacement of content by that same content in
a different form, such as a printed book being replaced by an
electronic version. The second is by media consumers shifting their
interest from one medium to another, such as preferring to watch
television rather than read a book, or surf the Internet rather than
leaf through magazines. Both forces are at work, but the second
has been at work for generations.
So many completely unforeseen changes have occurred within
Executive Summary
Is there any
traditional print
application
around that isnt
threatened to
be supplanted
by an electronic
alternative at any
minute?
5
just the last ve years that we know to expect even advances
and changes in the next 5 to 10 years, though we may not be
able today to say exactly what those will include. Whether these
advances and changes will aid or impede the displacement of print
and paper remains to be seen, though we can make some educated
predictions.
In the 500 years since the advent of printing, the media landscape
has changed, slowly at rst, but quite rapidly in the 19th century.
The rst real media competitor to print was the telegraph (1844),
and since then, new media channels have emerged at a fairly
steady clipfrom the telephone (1876) to the fax machine (1856),
to radio, motion pictures, television, home video, and ultimately the
Internet. The emergence of social media in the 00s wasnt anything
truly revolutionary, but rather represented an evolution of basic
Internet capabilities.
If there is anything we can say about todays changing media
landscape versus previous changes, its that new things are evolving
much more quickly. Look at what has changed in just ve years:
TABLE 0.1 2005 vs. 2010Social and mobile media
Even now, as many people are still trying to come to terms with
old social media, new implementations are starting to gain
tractiongeolocation services such as Foursquare, for example, are
looming on the horizon.
The forces that are sweeping through and altering the media
landscape can be categorized in a few basic ways:
Changing Consumer DemographicsThe rst digital natives
were born in 1990 and 1991 and grew up never knowing a world
without the Internet, mobile phones, and other high-tech devices.
More than 60 million people in the U.S. alone have been born since
the Internet went into broad public use in 1995. With a population
of 307 million today, that means that 19 percentalmost one
fthof the U.S. population has never known a life without the
Internet.
Changing Trends in Advertising and MarketingOne
consistent data point of the past 15 years is that advertiser
spending on old media (which includes print) is on the wane
while spending on new media (Internet, search, mobile) is on the
increase. As an example, media tracker eMarketer estimates that
in the U.S. alone, online will account for just over 20 percent of all
media spending by 2014.
Social MediaWhile blogs and YouTube can in some sense be
considered social media, what we typically mean by social media
is Twitter and Facebook. Media tracker eMarketer estimates that
worldwide spending on social-media marketing in 2011 will be in
excess of $2 billion.
Mobile (smartphones and tablets like the iPad)The line
between social media and mobileor between the Web and the
mobile Webis getting more and more blurred. Marketers and
CLICK TO VIEW TABLE
Executive Summary
6
advertisers have seized on mobile app developments as a way to help
get the user to decide to be marketed to.
Publishing TrendsNewspaper circulation peaked in the 1970s,
and started to level off in the 1980s. By the time the World Wide
Web went public in 1991, the decline had already been starting,
due in large part to the advent of cable news in 1980. Magazines
have seen similar declines. According to data from the Audit Bureau
of Circulation, between the years 2000 and 2010, U.S. magazine
subscription circulation dropped about three percent, even as the
population rose nearly 1 percent per year. E-books are the only book
category experiencing double-digit growth rates (71 percent CAGR
between 2002 and 2009, according to the Association of American
Publishers), thanks to compelling new hardware devices such as the
Amazon Kindle and the Apple iPad. 2010 saw the rst million-selling
e-book author(s): the late Stieg Larsson, of the ubiquitous Millennium
series, was the rst author to sell one million Kindle e-books, while
James Patterson was the rst to sell one million e-books comprised of
various formats.
Changing Trends in Corporate CommunicationsBusiness
letters, forms, annual reports, etc., have been migrating in digital
directions. E-mail, instant messaging, and the mobile phone have
largely replaced other types of business communications, and forms
are more often than not produced on an ofce printer, although PDF-
based or online forms are quickly replacing printed forms. A 2008
study of annual report trends found that 28 percent of companies
offer a link to their annual report (usually in PDF form) on their
corporate Web site, 13% of Canadian and 24% of U.S. companies
offer an HTML version of their annual report, and only 7% offer the
entire report only in HTML. Annual reports are important investor
and public-relations documents, and if the migration to sole electronic
format has been slow, it will likely increase, especially as the slickest
annual reports begin to incorporate rich media, such as animation
and video. Letters from company presidents and CEOs have always
been an important feature of annual reports, so it is not unreasonable
to expect that video letters will gradually replace written ones.
What are those factors that are driving the changing media
landscape we saw in the last section? And what are those factors that
impede those changes? We can identify a few areas:
Consumer Technology Adoption TrendsFuturist and inventor
Ray Kurzweil has often written about the exponential rate of
technological change. For example, it took about fty years for the
telephone to achieve a signicant level of usage, yet it took only
about ten years for the mobile phone to achieve similar levels. As for
other consumer technologies:
TABLE 0.2 Adoption rates of selected consumer technologies
Years to Reach
10% Adoption
Years to Reach 50% Adop-
tion
Video Cassette Recorder 10 14
Compact Disc Player 4.5 10.5
Color TV 12 18
Mobile phone 8 15
Personal Computer 4 18
Source: Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, Viking, 2005, pp. 48-49
Executive Summary
7
Note that none of these are print-based, and yet every new nonprint
consumer technology that has achieved any degree of adoption is
one more driver for the displacement of print.
An even bigger force is broadband adoption. Dr. Joe Webb, of
WhatTheyThinks Economics and Research Center, has calculated
that for every additional hour of broadband time spent online at
home, U.S. commercial printing volume declines by $2.
Publishing TrendsOne deadly mistake that newspaper and
magazine publishers made early on was fail to charge for online
content from Day One. The problem today isnt so much that
readers dont want to pay for content; its that they got inured to
the fact that online content was free. Publishers didnt assign any
value to their online content at the outset, and as a result, neither
did the marketplace. Branded apps for the iPad have been viewed
as a potential salvation for the publishing industry, but it remains
to be seen what the value proposition for the reading public is. Its
difcult to imagine how branded magazine apps can compete with
the breadth of information that exists for free online. For instance,
in technology journalism, how can a traditional print vehicle like
Popular Science compete with the Gizmodos, BoingBoings, and
Engadgets of the Internet, all of which are blog-like in format and
have achieved enough recognition that they are granted the same
(if not better) access to primary industry sources that so-called real
journalists enjoy.
Text to Rich MediaThe history of media changes in Western
culture has been a steady migration from static to dynamic content.
That is, from text and images to rich media such as animation,
video, audio. The biggest growth area for rich media is online
video. In September 2010 alone, more than 175 million U.S. users
watched online video. And more and more businesses are starting
to incorporate online video, and not just for delivering ads. New
developments in print could help bridge this gap between static
and dynamic media. Printable electronics or the ability to add small
displays to printed materials can make print rich, adding a visual
component that is only a short leap away from those greeting
cards that play songs when you open them. Other interactive print
elements such as QR codes and Augmented Reality use print as a
jumping-off point for rich media experiences.
Growth of Electronic BooksSince 2006, e-books have become
more mainstream, and while they represent a very small percentage
of overall book sales, they are growing steadily and strongly.
E-books have gone from one-half percent of all U.S. book sales in
2008 to one percent in 2009. Still a drop in the bucket, but if you
accumulate enough drops, eventually you get a pretty full bucket.
There are several barriers to e-books displacing printed books. The
rst is the variety of formats and devices available, which is often
frustrating for consumers, as well as emerging price wars in which it
is not unusual to nd a title in hardcover that is less expensive than
its corresponding e-book version.
Executive Summary
8
The following items are some basic technologies that provide the
foundation for the displacement of print and paper:
Internet
Search
Broadband/WiFi
Cloud computing
RFID
The following are media enablers that use some of the above
technology enablers to further displace print and paper in specic
niches:
Web sites
E-mail
Blogs
RSS
Podcasts
Social media
Video
Geolocation
The following are some hardware devices and technologies that
are enablers of the displacement of print in that the Internet, social
media, e-mail, video, and all the media enablers cited above can be
accessed on these devices.
E-readers and e-books
Smartphones
Tablet computers
The following are some display enablers, or new display
technologies and developments that are making electronic reading
more comfortable and viable, offering yet another way that print
and paper can be displaced:
Flexible displays
3D displays
The following are some disablers, or technologies that can help
print and paper compete with electronic media, particularly when
it comes to the twin issues of timeliness and relevance, which
have largely been the forces driving the adoption of electronic
dissemination of content.
Print on demand
Printed electronics
Quick Response (QR) codes
Augmented Reality (AR)
What does the future hold for paper? Print and paper applications
will be affected in different ways. The applications that will be most
heavily displaced by electronic media include:
Directories
Financial statements/bills
Manuals/technical documentation
Transpromotional
Flyers
Letterhead/envelopes
Executive Summary
9
Those applications that will be moderately displaced by electronic
media include:
Books
Catalogs
Magazines
Newspapers
Checks
Legal documents
Signage
Direct mail
Brochures
Retail labels
Those applications that will be minimally or negligibly displaced by
electronic media include:
Business cards
Passports/licenses/personal ID
Credit cards
Folding cartons
Flexible packaging
Adhesive labels
Displacement Conclusions
While its true that there is a tremendous paper-to-pixel shift
happening, which will only intensify in the coming decade and
beyond, it will forever remain a multichannel, multimedia world, and
print will need to complement and supplement these other media.
It behooves printers and their universe of suppliers and vendors
to help them assist communicatorswho are, after all, printers
customersto integrate and effectively use all of these (and future)
media in tandem. That is where the real opportunity for the paper
industry lies.
Executive Summary
10
Introduction
As I was nishing this report on the displacement of paper and
print by electronic media, I happened to readelectronicallya
review of a new biography of Al Jaffe, a U.S. cartoonist and
longtime contributor to Mad, a humor/satire magazine that was
somewhat of a staple of the typical American childhood in the
1970s. Jaffe invented what is known as the cover fold-in, which
works like this: The inside back cover of the printed magazine
asks a question and, below it, features a single drawing and a
paragraph of text. There are two arrows labeled A and B, and
when the page is folded so that A and B meet, the remaining
unobscured text underneath the picture becomes a satirical answer
to the question, while the picture morphs into a new image
illustrating the new text.
My initial thought was, A-ha! Thats an application of print/paper
that couldnt really be replaced by electronic media. Curious, I did
a search and found that The New York Times has an interactive
Flash-based archive of Mad magazine cover fold-ins that lets users
virtually fold digital magazine covers. Sigh.
Trying to think of a print application that cant be supplanted by
an electronic alternative is becoming more and more difcult. Every
day, it seems, some new story hits the papers (the term papers
being more metaphor than anything, as these stories usually
appear on Web sites) about some new application of electronic
media. Such as, say, this story from the New York Times:
At Bones, Atlantas most venerable steakhouse, a clubby place
of oak paneling and white tablecloths, the gold-jacketed waiters
now greet diners by handing them an iPad. It is loaded with the
restaurants extensive wine list, holding detailed descriptions and
ratings of 1,350 labels.
Call it novelty perhaps, but the restaurant has seen wine sales per
diner increase 11 percent. Some people still prefer to question the
sommelier about wine choices, obviously, but others nd that an
electronic wine list provides an ostensibly unbiased opinion. For
the restaurant, the e-wine list is linked to the inventory system,
facilitating reordering and stock management.
We often think of paper and printing in terms of obvious
applications: direct mail, magazines and newspapers, etc., and the
electronic displacement of these items has been well-documented,
and will continue to be throughout this report. But what about
smaller stealth print and paper applicationslike wine lists?
Is paper as a medium for conveying content in danger of
extinction? And if it does not become extinct, then how endangered
might it get? What are the forces at work that make extinction a
viable possibility to ponder, and, conversely, what are the forces
that could keep print from falling over the brink? Where will paper
be in the year 2020?
We will explore this topic in this report.
We will nd that technology is spearheading this transition, but
at the same time peoples attitudes toward paper are changing. In
fact, paper use is often seen as an unmitigated environmental evil.
1
Trying to think of
a print application
that cant be
supplanted by
an electronic
alternative is
becoming more
and more difcult.
Every day, it seems,
some new story
hits the papers...
11
For example:
Do Not Print In the United States it is common to see, appended
to the signature les of many peoples e-mails, the admonishment
Please think about the environment before printing this message.
The implication is that paper is an unspeakably evil environmental
scourge and that pixels and the electronics that power them are
sacred and holy, the salvation for the planets environmental woes.
In August 2009, a New York Times blog post asked, Are E-Readers
Greener than Books? and cited a study that reported that e-book
readers such as the Amazon Kindle have less of an environmental
impact than printed books do:
The report indicates that, on average, the carbon
emitted in the lifecycle of a Kindle is fully offset after
the rst year of use.
The report, authored by Emma Ritch, states: Any
additional years of use result in net carbon savings,
equivalent to an average of 168 kg of CO
2
per year (the
emissions produced in the manufacture and distribution
of 22.5 books).
But lets be perfectly clear: Electronic media do have a carbon cost.
In fact, in early 2009, a Harvard physicist made headlines when
he managed to calculate the carbon cost of a Google search. The
BBC, among others, reported:
U.S. physicist Alex Wissner-Gross claims that a typical Google
search on a desktop computer produces about 7 g CO
2
.
The Harvard academic argues that these carbon
emissions stem from the electricity used by the computer
terminal and by the power consumed by the large data
centers operated by Google around the world.
Though Wissner-Gross subsequently corrected his data (seems he
overestimated slightly), the fact remained that electronic media do
have a carbon cost.
Meanwhile, a 2007 Gartner Group report warned about the carbon
cost of all the servers that comprise companies intranets and the
Internet in general:
The intense power requirements needed to run and
cool data centers now account for almost a quarter of
global carbon dioxide emissions from information and
communications technology.
And lets not forget all the discarded computers, peripherals, mobile
phones, PDAs, iPods, and so on.
Its becoming increasingly common for print-based media to come
under re for being environmentally irresponsible, although the
argument doesnt quite hold up under close examination: Yes, the
use of paper cuts down trees, but trees are a renewable resource, and
the U.S. paper industry plants 1.7 million new trees each day, for a
total of 621 million new trees planted per year, for a net gain of 521
million trees annually. And, yes, discarded paper ends up in landlls,
but how many rst- and second-generation Kindles are going to end
up in landlls in the next few years where, unlike paper, there is no
possibility of their biodegrading? And depending on the batteries
they contain, they may also leach toxins into the groundwater.
12
There nonetheless appears to be a movement afoot to essentially
ban paper (there is Do Not Mail legislature coursing through various
state governments that would make it illegal to mail materials to
people who specically ask not to receive unsolicited matter. It is
rather obvious, however, that we dont actually need legislation, or
any kind of encouragement, to reduce the use of paper.
Therefore, the major theme of this report will be: Where does
our increasingly electronic media-based culture leave paper and,
ultimately, the entire paper industry?
Objective and Scope
This report, then, aimsin a hybrid quantitative/qualitative
wayto gauge the extent to which print and paper are going to
be displaced by some form of electronic media by 2020. There
are, however, two ways that this displacement is occurring: The
rst is by direct replacement of content by that same content in
a different form, such as a printed book being replaced by an
electronic version. The second is by media consumers shifting their
interest from one medium to another, such as preferring to watch
television rather than read a book, or surf the Internet rather than
leaf through magazines. Both forces are at work, but the second
has been at work for generations.
Chapter 2 of this report, following this Introduction, looks at the
changing media landscapewhat are the demographic, advertising,
publishing, social-media, mobile, and corporate communications
trends that are affecting any displacement of print and paper?
Chapter 3 looks at the drivers and barriers of electronic
displacement in the context of consumer technology adoption,
technology shifts in publishing (especially e-books), a gradual
transition to rich media, and other related topics.
Chapter 4 lays out the roster of displacement enablersthe
Internet, WiFi, social media, e-books, iPads, etc.and gauges each
ones potential to displace print and paper in addition to revealing
any aws in these enablers. This section also provides some
disablersnew developments in printing that can help deter the
displacement of print and paper.
Chapter 5 provides a look at each category of printed material, and
an estimate of how much each will likely be displaced in the next
10 years.
Methodology
The bulk of the research for this project was the result of the
authors experience covering the emergence and proliferation of
electronic media for the past 15 years. This report includes the
results of studies and analyses of government and industry data
(many of which the author has participated in) that look at the
growth of electronic media at the expense of print and paper. There
has been much trawling through secondary research, as well as a
great number of conversations (and even formal interviews) with
people inside and outside the industry over the past decade. A prior
Pira study published in 2008 called The Electronic Displacement of
Print: Forecasts to 2018, was also a good source of information.
Much of the information and data have a U.S. spin, but the same
13
forces are at work pretty much all over the world, and in some
surprising places. In many ways, the U.S. lags behind some other
countries in the ubiquity of electronic media and, in particular,
reliable Internet access everywhere. Asian cities such as Seoul and
Tokyo are the most wired cities in the world, and even in parts
of Africa (Kenya, for example) actual printed money has been
replaced by mobile-phone-based nancial transactions.
In Section II we look at how much has happened just since 2005
that was completely unforeseen, so we should expect that things
will likely appear in the next 5 to 10 years that no one has any idea
about right now. Whether these advancements and changes will
aid or impede the displacement of print and paper remains to be
seen, though some basic conclusions on the issue can be drawn.
14
Introduction
The invention of printing in the mid-fteenth century displaced the
predominant method of disseminating content that had been in
place since the days of Charlemagne: scribes. That is, monks used
to hand-copy books and other documents. By the 1490s, the scribe
was well on his way to obsolescence, which distressed a German
abbot named Johann Trithemius. Back then, one of the side
benets of hand-copying manuscripts was that the effort left ample
time for prayer. So Trithemius wrote a treatise called In Praise of
Scribes, in which he urged scribes not to abandon manuscript
copying. And then, in one of the great ironic moments of history,
Trithemius had In Praise of Scribes printed on a printing press so
that he could get it produced and distributed quickly. So the next
time you see a commercial printer marketing his services via e-mail
or other electronic media, think of Trithemius and how he embraced
new media to promote old media.
In the 500 years since, the media landscape has quite obviously
changed, albeit slowly at rst. It wasnt until the mid-nineteenth
century that the rst real media competitor to print emergedthe
telegraph, in 1844. Since then, new media channels have emerged
fairly steadily, from the telephone (1876) to radio, motion pictures,
television, home video, and ultimately the Internet, which began its
domination of the media landscape in the 1990s. The emergence
of social media in the 00s wasnt anything truly revolutionary,
but rather represented an evolution of basic Internet capabilities,
much like, say, the postcard (developed in the 1860s) wasnt
a revolutionary printing application, but rather evolved out of
lithographic printing as well as changes in the postal system.
If there is anything we can say about todays changing media
landscape versus previous changes, its that new things are moving
much more quickly. How quickly? The table below gives a snapshot
of what has changed in just ve years:
2005 2010
No Twitter (launched 2006) 106 million-plus Twitter users
No Amazon Kindle
(launched 2007)
3 million=plus Kindles sold; rst million-e-book-
selling Kindle author (the late Stieg Larsson)
Facebook an obscure
student site
500 million-plus active Facebook users
No iPhone (launched 2007) 50 million-plus iPhones sold; 100,000-plus apps
developed; 3 billion-plus apps downloaded
No iPad (launched 2010) 3 million iPads sold in 80 days
Source: Pira International Ltd
Even now, as many people are still trying to come to terms with
old social media, new implementations are starting to gain
tractiongeolocation services such as Foursquare, for example, are
looming on the horizon.
And now, at the beginning of the second decade of this century,
there are already a multitude of media channels that, say, any
marketing professional would be remiss not to consider when
crafting a message.
2
Even now, as many
people are still
trying to come to
terms with old
social media, new
implementations
are starting to
gain traction
geolocation services
such as Foursquare,
for example, are
looming on the
horizon.
15
The following is just a partial listing:
Print advertising
Postcard/direct mail
Periodicals (magazine/newspaper)
E-zines/e-newspapers (like Zinio, newsstand)
Printed newsletter
Printed catalog
Web site
Online ad
Search (paid) advertising
Search engine optimization (SEO)
E-newsletters/direct e-mail
Telephone marketing
SMS/MMS marketing (aka texting)
Electronic displays
ATMs
Gas pumps
Appliances
Cars
Store checkout lines
Sporting eventsevery available surface
T-shirts
Banners
Outdoor graphics
Vehicle wraps
Transactional/transpromotional
Blimps
Blogging/vlogging
Podcasting
RSS
Viral marketing
Wallpaper
Ringtones
Social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
YouTube
Mobile marketing
Smartphone apps
Social bookmarking/folksonomy (Digg, Delicious)
Geolocation services (Foursquare)
There are three dominant issues that anyone involved with the
printing and paper industries needs to understand:
The proliferation of media and channels means that
any given marketing budget pie must now be cut into
more slices. And, at the same time, it is rather unlikely
that a marketing budget will increase enoughif at
allto cover the expense of those new slices.
Media choice is a personal consumer preference,
and companies that focus exclusively on just one or
two channels run the risk of bypassing everyone else
entirely.
Marketing requires a strategy vis--vis media choice
to ensure that the individual or company crafting
a message reaches the appropriate people in the
appropriate way.
16
In the case of publishing, there may be fewer channels, but the
ability to disseminate content in multiple media simultaneously
and somehow monetize ithas never been a greater challenge.
Publishers are by necessity starting to become if not kings, then
perhaps at the very least dauphins of all media, as they spin out
the same basic content in print, on the Web, via e-newsletters,
Twitter posts, Facebook, and/or as mobile-phone apps, etc. The
publishers goal is to get content to as many consumers as possible
in whatever way they prefer it; that consumers prefer content for
free has been a perennial problem.
The forces that are sweeping through and altering the media
landscape can be categorized in a few basic ways:
Changing consumer demographics
Changing trends in advertising and marketing
The emergence and proliferation of social media and its
gradual evolution
Changing trends in corporate communications
The emergence of mobile (via smartphones and tablets
like the iPad) and the increasing portability of internet
content
Consumer Demographics
The rst digital natives were born in 1990 and 1991; they grew up
never knowing a world without the Internet, mobile phones, and
other high-tech devices. These folksone can scarcely call them kids
anymoreare now in university, and if theyre not already in the
workforce, they will be shortly.
The next batch are the so-called millennials, kids who were
born circa 2000 and are now their tween and preteen years, and
have grown up thus far with an even greater relationship to new
technology. Dr. Joe Webb, director of WhatTheyThinks Economics
and Research Center, has estimated that more than 60 million
people in the U.S. alone have been born since the Internet went
into public use in 1995. With a population of 307 million today,
that means that 19% of the U.S. population has never known life
without the Internet.
Take this USA Today article from four years ago:
A.J. Hunter cant start the day without rst pulling out his
laptop. Each morning, the 21-year-old Ball State University junior
downloads his schedule onto his Mac Powerbook G4, whichalong
with his iPod and cell phoneis always close at hand.
Hunter, of Uniondale, Indiana, is a typical tech-savvy college
student. He can access the social networking site Facebook from his
cell phone. He uses e-mail and instant messaging anywhere on the
wireless campus. He downloads music to his laptop and his iPod,
and he uses a 1-gigabyte ash drive provided by the university to
transfer les and songs and to access his digital portfolio.
An elementary-education major with a concentration in technology,
he says the portfolio includes lesson plans and other documents
illustrating his progress in his eld. He transfers les to his folder on
the universitys iLocker to save storage space on his computer.
17
Technology is so second-nature, I cant even think of when I use it
and when I dont. Its such a part of life, he says.
Hunter isnt a techno-geek. Hes just a digital native a term that
has been used to describe millennials, the rst generation who grew
up in a world lled with computers, cell phones and cable TV.
And this was before there were Kindles, iPhones, or iPadsand even
before Facebook and Twitter.
The people growing up in a completely wired/wireless world
obviously have a much different relationship to print and paper
than their forebears. This is not to say that everyone under 30 is a
digital nativejust as not everyone who grew up in the 1970s was
glued to the televisionbut a fair proportion are, simply because
theres no real reason not to be.
Any displacement of print and paper will largely be driven by
young people who, obviously, grow older, and bring their media
consumption habits and preferences into adulthood with them.
And just as older people continue toputting it euphemistically
exit the market, obviously that original 20 percent of digital
natives will only continue to grow.
Advertising and Marketing Trends
One of the consistent data points of the past ten to fteen years
is that advertiser spending on old media (which includes print,
television, and radioso-called ofine media) is on the wane
while spending on new media (Internet, search, mobile) is on the
increase. The numbers and projections vary according to who is
providing them, but there are general trends.
As an example, Kantar Media (www.KantarMediaNA.com)
is one company that tracks advertising spending and makes
periodic announcements about past and prospective spending. In
September 2010, Kantar released their data on U.S. advertising
spending in the rst half of 2010. The chart below provides some
top-level spending data, while the table that follows drills down a
bit deeper.
FIGURE 2.1 U.S. advertising expenditure increase/decrease,
January to June 2010 (%)
TABLE 2.2 U.S. advertising expenditure increase/decrease,
January to June 2010 (%)
Another U.S. media tracker, eMarketer, also releases estimates
and projections of advertising and marketing spending by media
channel. In June 2010, they issued revised numbers of online
advertising (see below gure). Individual media growth numbers
alone are not especially helpful; in the case of online and other
new media, double-digit growth is easy when youre starting from
a very low base. What is more telling in the gure below is the
growth in online as a percentage of all media advertising spending.
According to eMarketer estimates, in the U.S. alone, online will
account for just over 20 percent of all media spending by 2014.
FIGURE 2.2 U.S. online advertising spending, 2008-2014
Its a bit amusing to look even as far ahead as 2014, given how
quickly things change and channels appear. After all, how many
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18
ve-year forecasts in 2005 said anything about mobile or social
media dominating in 2010?
Social Media
Social media encompasses a variety of formatsblogs and YouTube
can in some sense be considered social media. Forecasters and
estimators tend to use the term social media almost exclusively in
reference to Twitter (microblogging) and Facebook (social networking).
Spending on these channels can include not only display ads (such as
in Facebook) but also on social-media managementthat is, allocating
resources to monitor social-media mentions, and tweeting about ones
company or brand.
eMarketer estimates on social-media spending are shown in Table 2.3
TABLE 2.3 Social-media marketing spending, U.S. vs. non-U.S.,
2009-2011 ($ billion)
2009 2010 2011
U.S. 1.40 1.68 2.09
Non-U.S. 1.13 1.62 2.17
Source: eMarketer
More than a decade ago publication editors used to be barraged by
printed press releases and press kits. By the middle of the 2000s,
the number of snail-mailed press releases/kits received in the
course of a year could be counted on the ngers of one hand while
the corresponding number of e-mailed press releases increased
exponentially. Now, the number of e-mailed press releases seems
to be slowing while the number of PR-related tweets and Facebook
updates seems to be on the rise.
Advertising Age magazine had an editorial in the September
2010 issue in which theyperhaps prematurelydeclared the
press release ofcially dead. Today most press kits are distributed
via e-mail, and even at shows, CD- or DVD-related press kits are
more and more the norm. Since 2008, tweets have functioned
much like mini-press releases, and social media management
is an increasingly large part of public relations. While it is likely
to not replace the press release as we know it, social media do
supplement and complement more or less traditional PR functions.
Say what you want about social media, but it is quickly displacing
traditional information sourcesand traditional here can even
include formats like Web sites and blogs which, having been
around for more than a decade, can already be considered old
media. Indeed, blogs and other online information sites can be
programmed to autotweet.
The evolution of social media will likely encompass so-called
geolocation services or location-based applications. What are
location-based applications? The three top names associated
with location-based applications at the moment are Foursquare
(http://foursquare.com), Gowalla (http://gowalla.com), and Loopt
(www.loopt.com). Location-based applications are a new type of
social-networking software that lets users update their physical
location using mobile versions of location apps or text messaging.
Essentially, a user checks in at a venue (like a coffee shop) using
a mobile Web site, text messaging, or specic application. S/he
is then awarded points and sometimes badges. Users can nd
themselves appointed mayor of a particular location if they go
19
there often enough. Some location-based services, such as Gowalla,
award prizes to users, which can be thought of as a marketing tool
for companies.
Never heard of any of this? Youre not alone. A Forrester Research
study that came out in late July 2010 found that the user base
of these services is very small, nding, for example, that only 4%
of U.S. online adults have ever used location-based mobile apps,
and a scant 1% update them more than once a week. Even more
important, 84% of respondents said they arent familiar with them
at all.
FIGURE 2.3 Extent of familiarity with geolocation applications (%)
Location-based apps are less than two years old (some even
younger), so its not surprising that their names arent household
words for the majority of users. But that, of course, may change.
Mobile
The line between social media and mobile is becoming more
blurred. Or, indeed, the line between the Web and the mobile
Web. At present, there is a distinction, but it seems more than likely
that in two years the term mobile Web will be an anachronism, a
relic of an obsolete technology, or a time when the Internet could
not be readily accessed by mobile devices.
The term mobile conjures up images of iPhones, BlackBerrys, and
other smartphones, but the Apple iPad and other new tablet PCs
hitting the market also fall into the mobile category. The serious
challenge for print and paper isas we saw in the Introduction with
the story about electronic wine liststhat the iPad makes Internet
content exceedingly portable in the same way the iPhone did, but
with a form factor that is more comfortable to read and interact
with. The iPad and other devices such as the Amazon Kindle are
also usurping traditional publishing applications such as books,
magazines, and newspapers away from print. (We will look at this
in more detail in Section III.)
Mobile advertising and marketing is one of the older (more than
ten years) forms of new media marketing, and yet the concept has
evolved to become almost unrecognizable in practice from what
it had been conceived as. In the late 1990s, when mobile phones
began to proliferate, marketers seized on the idea of using them
as an advertising and marketing vehicle. One early concept was
to identify when a phone was near a particular location and then
send targeted pitches to it. For instance, if someone was walking
past a Starbucks, their mobile would ring, and theyd get an
advertisement for coffee. For fairly obvious reasons, this never really
took off; at the timeand in large measure stillmobile phone
owners pay for incoming calls and the thought of paying to receive
what would be essentially telemarketing calls would derail mobile
marketing even before it started.
About ve years later, the smartphone appeared. SMS and MMS
messaging (i.e., texting), the mobile Internet, andwith the advent
of the Apple iPhone in 2007mobile apps have all helped to make
mobile marketing and advertising a reality, albeit in ways no one
expected. In fact, this very idea now forms the basis of location-
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20
based apps. Instead of your mobile ringing when you are outside a
favorite coffee shop, you may get a notice via the Foursquare app
on your phone that if you venture inside, a discount awaits you.
The difference? Its the users decision. Getting an ad at random
especially an intrusive one, like a call on your mobileput the
power of the message in the hands of the advertiser. No one likes
relinquishing power over their own devices, but when its the user
who controls the relationship with the advertiser, thats a whole
different story. This is one of the reasons that marketers are so
keen on iPhone and iPad apps: They are vehicles to provide what
are essentially marketing initiatives, but in a way that users nd
entertaining, useful, and/or informative. And downloading them is
the users idea.
Thats an important distinction because it has been found that
usersespecially younger ones, who are the prime users of
mobilesalmost universally loathe the idea of ads on their personal
devices, as eMarketer reported in mid-2010:
Fully 100% of college students in the U.S. have a mobile
phone, and they use them constantly to communicate
and connect. As such, mobile marketing becomes more
difcult among this group because they see the devices as
so personal.
A Ball State University study of a primarily female group
of college students found that a majority of them had
seen ads on their phones, including 51.2% of smartphone
or touchscreen phone users and 61.3% of feature-phone
users. Text ads were most prevalent.
Their reactions to ads were highly negative. More than
40% were annoyed to get an ad, compared with just
1.2% who were pleased and 17.6% who were neutral.
Even more dramatic, nearly three in 10 said they were
less likely to purchase a product after seeing a mobile ad
for it. Slightly fewer reported their purchase intent was
unchanged, but only a small number said mobile ads
encouraged them to purchase.
What this means for the Apple iAd platform remains to be seen.
What is iAd? The iAd platform is basically a way to serve ads to
iPhone and iPad users by allowing developers and marketers to
embed interactive ads within apps.
One iteration of iAd scheme has been developed by the online
radio station Pandora, which has its own ad platform for the iPad:

Pandora, which lets people create personal stations
based on their music tastes, said the in-app ads can be
targeted to listeners based on their age, location, and the
music they like.
The ads from coffee brewer Starbucks will let users build
their own personal Frappuccino drinks online, which then
generate a radio station that tries to pair the music with
their taste in coffee. The spot from Lexus revs up the
engine of an LFA sports car until it shatters a champagne
21
glass. And Budweisers promo will connect people with the
various music festivals that the beer maker is sponsoring.
Pandora founder Tim Westergren is eyeing the iPad as a
more powerful ad platform than the iPhone, according
to a story in Advertising Age. He sees Apples tablet as
particularly exciting for Pandora, since consumers carry
the device around with them and engage with it as they
listen to music.
Pandora now has 50 million users, with 30 million of
them accessing the service through mobile devices,
according to Ad Age. Westergren said the company is
adding about 10,000 new mobile users each day and is
looking to drive that number even further with the iPad.
Its hard to nd a music fan who isnt impressed with Pandoras
Music Genome Project, even if the ads are occasionally intrusive,
although much less so than traditional radio. Like traditional
advertising, it will be a hit-or-miss proposition. Given that even
general Web-based click-through rates have been declining, its
difcult to see how the iAd model will work any better.
Publishing Trends
It is no secret that the Internet has greatly affected traditional
publishing markets. But then, every new medium before the
Internet made its impact felt as well. For example, the following
gure, showing U.S. newspaper circulation gures going back 60
years, superimposes the appearance of new media.
FIGURE 2.4 U.S. newspaper circulation, 1940 2008
Note that U.S. newspaper circulation peaked in the 1970s, and
started to level off in the 1980s. By the time the World Wide Web
went public in 1991, the decline had already been starting, due in
large part to the advent of cable news in 1980.
That is to say, earlier, nonprint sources of news were far more
responsible than the Internet for the decline in newspaper
circulation.
Media in general, radio, television, video, the Internet, etc., have all,
over the decades, steadily chipped away at print readership.
Magazines have been experiencing similar declines.
FIGURE 2.5 Magazine ad pages, indexed, 1999-2010 (1998 = 100)
According to data from the Audit Bureau of Circulation, between 2000
and 2010, U.S. magazine subscription circulation dropped about 3
percent, even as the population rose nearly 1 percent per year.
As for books, data from the Association of American Publishers has found:
TABLE 2.4 Compound annual growth rate for selected book categories,
2002-2009 (%)
All books 1.8
Adult hardcover books 1.3
Adult paperback books 2.6
E-books 71
Source: Association of American Publishers
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22
E-books are a hot topic these days, thanks to compelling new
hardware devices such as the Amazon Kindle and the Apple iPad.
2010 saw the rst million-selling e-book author(s): the late Stieg
Larsson, of the ubiquitous Millennium series, was the rst author
to sell one million Kindle e-books, while James Patterson was the
rst to sell one million e-books across all formats.
Publishers are striving to nd their place in an increasingly
electronic world. Still, its important to bear in mind that their
own landscape has been changing for decades, due in large
part to long-term declines in reading in general. Curiously, new
technologies may actually reverse this trend. A study released in
August 2010 by the U.S. childrens publisher Scholastic has found
that the existence of e-books may stimulate more children to read
books for enjoyment, something that (at least in the U.S.) has been
in decline for decades (most people blame the TV for that one).
Corporate Communications
Its no secret to anyone that what we think of corporate
communicationsbusiness letters at its most basic, forms, annual
reports, etc.have been migrating in digital directions. E-mail,
instant messaging, and the mobile phone have largely replaced
other types of business communications, and forms are more often
than not produced on an ofce printer, although PDF-based or
online forms are replacing printed forms. One relative bright spot
in printed corporate communications remains the annual report,
which is still considered a company showcase; therefore, companies
tend to spring for higher-end print-manufacturing capabilities that
will help convey the rosiest picture of their vitality and nancial
standing. A 2008 study of annual report trends found that 28
percent of companies offer a link to their annual report (usually in
PDF form) on their corporate Web site, 13 percent of Canadian and
24 percent of U.S. companies offer an HTML version of their annual
report, and only 7 percent offer the entire report only in HTML.
Annual reports are important investor and public-relations
documents, and if the migration to a total electronic format has
been slow, it will likely pick up steam, especially as the slickest
annual reports are starting to incorporate rich media, such as
animation and video. Letters from company presidents and CEOs
have always been an important feature of annual reports, so it is
not unreasonable to expect that video letters will gradually replace
written ones.

23
Introduction
What factors are driving the changing media landscape we saw in
the last section? And what factors are impeding those changes? We
can identify a few areas:
Consumer technology adoption trends
Publishing trends
Migration away from static text and images to rich
media
Growth of electronic books
Consumer Technology Adoption Trends
Anticipating what the consumer is going to latch onto has always
been a fools errand at best and rife for retrospective embarrassment
at worst. Take, for example, some of these hilariously misguided
quotes, which always turn up in conversations about how
forecasters, predictors, and prognosticators got it wrong:
Heavier-than-air ying machines are impossible.
Lord Kelvin, president of the British Royal Society, 1895
Everything that can be invented has been invented. Charles H.
Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Ofce of Patents, 1899
Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?
Harry M. Warner, president of Warner Brothers, 1927
There is not the slightest indication that [nuclear] energy will ever
be obtainable.
Albert Einstein, 1932
There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.
Ken Olsen, President, Digital Equipment Corp., 1977
640K ought to be enough for anybody.
Attributed to Bill Gates, 1981
We dont like their sound. Groups of guitars are on the way out.
Decca Recording Company executive, 1962, rejecting The Beatles
And this is nothing new. No one in the 1450s could have foreseen
the impact that the invention of printing would have on the world,
just as no one could have foreseen the impact of the telegraph or
the telephone, and just as few foresaw the impact of the Internet.
Sure, there are always a few visionaries, but they are few and far
between.
And the situation is the same with some of the even newer
technologies that are emerging. Mobile? Social media? Location
apps? Were any of these on anyones radar ve years ago? In 1999,
did anyone expect the iPod and iTunes would decimate the record
industry? In 1990, did anyone ever even utter the word Internet?
In 1975, could anyone have anticipated that home video would
completely disrupt the lm industry? In 1935, were radio executives
worried about something called television?
There is a sense now, though, that more and more disruption
is happening much more quickly. Its not an illusion. Writers
and futurists point out that technological evolution happens
exponentially. So we can look forward to new things emerging and
3
Anticipating what
the consumer is
going to latch onto
has always been
a fools errand
at best and rife
for retrospective
embarrassment at
worst.
24
taking over even faster. But just as the perception of the passage
of time speeds up as we get older, so the reality of technological
change speeds up as time goes on.
Futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil has often written about the
exponential rate of technological change. For example, it took
about fty years for the telephone to achieve a signicant level
of usage, yet it took only about ten years for the mobile phone to
achieve similar levels. As for other consumer technologies:
Years to Reach
10% Adoption
Years to Reach
50% Adoption
Video Cassette Recorder 10 14
Compact Disc Player 4.5 10.5
Color TV 12 18
Cell phone 8 15
Personal Computer 4 18
Source: Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, Viking, 2005, pp. 48-49
Note that none of these is print-based. In fact, every new nonprint
consumer technology that has achieved any degree of adoption is
one more driver for the displacement of print. After all, a VCR (and
later a DVD player), a TV, a PCall of these things represent things
that one can be doing instead of consuming print.
Take broadband. The increase in broadband Internet adoption
has been exceedingly briskand has had an even bigger impact
on the demand for print and paper. Dr. Webb of WhatTheyThinks
Economics and Research Center has plotted the adoption of
broadband access against the value of printing shipments:
FIGURE 3.1 Billions of household broadband hours vs. billions of
printing dollars, 2000-2009
Regression analysis (r
2
= 72 percent) nds that for every additional
hour of broadband time spent online at home, U.S. commercial
printing volume declines by $2.
And the Internet represents even more things that consumers
can be doing than consuming print. In fact, broadband Internet
has the potential to replace everything in Table 8, above. Video
can be streamed online, TV programmes can be watched online,
phone calls can be made using Skype or other VOIP services, and
music can be streamed from online sources. And since all of these
things can also be done on an iPad, or even a mobile phone, there
will come a time when you wont even need a personal computer
anymore.
So when the things that displaced print are themselves displaced,
that doesnt bode especially well for print, does it?
TABLE 3.2 Consumer technology adoptiondrivers of and barriers to
displacement of print
Publishing Trends
We looked at some of the statistics on the three major publishing
markets (books, magazines, newspapers) in Chapter 2, but here
well look at some general qualitative publishing trends, conning
our discussion to magazines, newspapers, and catalogs. Books will
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25
be discussed in a separate section below.
Magazines It has never been easier to physically produce and
launch a magazine than it is today, and yet it has also never
been harder to sell a magazine, either on the newsstand or by
subscription. Most all industry datasets reveal print circulations
declining and ad pages declining as well. Data from the postal
service on weight of mail sent shows continuing declines. Does this
signal the end of print magazines as viable content providers?
Magazines took almost as long as newspapers to regard the
Internet both as a threat and as an opportunity. Its a threat
because it is a vast well of basically free content (and space), and
magazine publishers early on did two things that came back to
haunt them: They saw the Web as the ugly stepchild of print and
launched a bare-bones branded site merely to be able to say the
brand had a Web presence. They skimped on content, posting only
a few select articles from the print edition, and over the years, they
eventually added back issues.
More important is what they didnt do, which wasin general
charge for online content. The problem today isnt so much that
readers dont want to pay for content; its that they got inured to
the fact that online content was free. Publishers didnt assign any
value to their online content at the outset, and as a result, neither
did the marketplace. And so, those digital natives mentioned in
Section II, who grew up with the Internet, grew up thinking that
the only reason you pay for content is that print is expensive to
produce, that the content itself is valueless and wants to be free.
Its difcult to say that content wants to be free; rather, it seems
more the case that people want content to be free.
Now, what the appropriate price of online content should be is
open to debate. Sure, publishers dont have the physical printing
and mailing, but there are costs associated with generating online
content: paying writers and editors (in theory anyway, if not always
in practice), paying designers and Web hosts, and paying for the
basic publishing company infrastructure. This is not to say that
magazine publishing heads need seven-gure incomes and swanky
Midtown Manhattan ofces, but there are costs associated with the
physical process of journalism, especially if you believe that most
writers and editors should be paid for their efforts.
This then leads to the discussion of advertising and the ways
that publishers have been trying to shift the nancial burden
of publishing (as B2B publishers do) on advertisers rather than
subscribers. The problem publishers have found is that they have
never been able to charge enough for online ads the way they do
for their print ads. Is this because, as some have said, advertisers
dont value online advertising as much as print advertising? That
cant be the case, otherwise advertisers would hardly have been
cutting their print spending in favour of online advertising, as study
after study over the past decade or more has shown.
Could it be, then, as others have said, that inventory in print is
severely limited (you can only add so many pages or fractions of a
page), while online inventory is nearly innite? Well, its not really
innite. And if youre, say, advertising in Newsweek magazine, there
is still a pretty nite amount of space, whether youre advertising
26
in the print edition or on their Web site. In some ways, Newsweek.
com may have fewer pages than the Newsweek print edition; that
is, a single feature story may jump to several physical pagesall
of which can support advertisingbut only occupy one deep Web
page with perhaps less opportunity for advertising.
Fast-forward to 2010, and magazines are pinning their hopes for
future growth on the iPad and, in particular, on apps that access
magazine content. But it has not been easy, especially given
Apples walled garden approach to the App Store. The idea is to
take the existing concept of the electronic magazine and improve
upon it.
Electronic magazines are typied by the offerings of the likes of
Zinio, an attempt to replicate the printed edition of a magazine in
electronic form, usually via some kind of PDF-like download. This
approach was taken often at the behest of the circulation auditors
like the Audit Bureau of Circulations, who until recently mandated
that electronic subscriptions can only be counted if the electronic
edition was virtually the same as the printed edition.
In 2009, the Audit Bureau of Circulations announced that they
were relaxing their requirements, allowing other types of electronic
magazines to be counted as circulation. This was good news for
those hoping to develop compelling iPad apps.
However, publishers soon ran up against another wall: Apple.
In some cases, users who want to subscribe to magazines on
the iPad have to pay what is essentially the full newsstand
pricealthough some publishers (like Time Inc.) provide a free
iPad subscription if you subscribe to the print edition, which rather
defeats the purpose.
But Apple actually prevents publishers from selling their own
subscription plans. Time Inc. recently had a ght with Apple
over it. The Wall Street Journals All Things Digital in July 2010
commented:
The magazine giant has been unable to get Apple to let it
sell and manage subscriptions for its iPad appsmuch to
Time Inc.s surprise.
Last month, the publisher was set to launch a subscription
version of its Sports Illustrated iPad app, where consumers
would download the magazines via Apples iTunes, but would
pay Time Inc. directly. But Apple rejected the app at the last
minute, forcing the Time Warner unit to sell single copies,
using iTunes as a middleman, multiple sources tell me.
Publishers prefer to control their own subscriptions. After all,
subscription info is data, and data are power. Furthermore:
No other magazine publisher has approval to sell their own
iTunes app subscriptions, either. But Apple and Steve Jobs
had made a point of reaching out to Time Inc. executives
and editors before the iPads launch, and encouraged them
to build digital editions for the platform.
27
Confusing the issue even more is that Apple already allows
a handful of app makerslike Amazon and the Wall
Street Journal, which, like this Web site, is owned by News
Corp.to bill customers directly. Amazon itself, meanwhile,
has been sparring with publishers over subscriptions for
its Kindle platform. Jeff Bezos keeps most of the data and
money that those transactions generate, too.
When you think about magazine subscriptions, you would think
that you purchase the iPad app and new issues are automatically
delivered to it, the same way the Zinio application works on a
proper computer. Not so: Sure, you get a notication of the issues
availability, but the user still has to retrieve it manually.
Time Inc. and some other big publishers grumble, but others arent
complaining too much. Bonnier launched their Popular Science+
for the iPad the day the iPad shipped, and, curiously, the digital
version actually costs more for a year subscription than the print
version. The app costs $2.99 and comes with one free issue; you
then sign up for an account and can purchase additional issues for
$2.99 a popthat works out to $35.88 a year for the iPad edition
of Popular Science whereas the print version costs $12. Likewise,
Maxim magazine had originally charged a higher subscription rate
for their iPhone app than for their print edition, until Apple asked
them to stop.
Why the higher cost for the iPad version? In some ways, the
publishers were doing something right. The digital version is
not just an electronic version of the print edition; it has content
designed specically for the medium. Bonnier sells Popular
Science+ subscriptions as in-app purchases, so they can still glean
the customer data they desire, but as long as publishers have
to go through iTunes, they will largely be ceding control of their
databases to Apple.
As of this writing, there is no solution yet, which, interestingly
enough, may help the Zinios of the world, who already sell
subscriptions via their own apps, and charge for subscriptions more
in line with print editions. But the idea is for publishers to develop
their own iPad apps rather than outsource it to Zinio.
If magazine publishing is going to thrive in the digital environment,
there needs to be some recapitulation of the old model of
subscription salesafter all, this is any publishers bread and butter,
and its unreasonable to expect readers to regularly buy single iPad
copies at the single-copy rate. Few consumers buy print copies this
way, and there is no reason to expect that they would purchase
digital copies any differently.
On the other hand, it does open up the eld to the various
competitors to the iPad (such as, for example, Research in Motion,
makers of the venerable BlackBerry, whose PlayBook tablet PC is
due sometime in early 2011). If these competitors allow content
creators more leeway in selling their content, Apple may have to sit
up and take notice.
The rules for magazines on the iPad are still being written (or at
least fought over), and it will be some time before anything like a
28
workable model emerges that suits everyone.
On a more macro leveland returning to the issue of electronic
displacement of printits difcult to see how branded magazine
apps can compete with the breadth of information that exists
for free online. For instance, in technology journalism, how can
a traditional print vehicle like Popular Science compete with the
Gizmodos, BoingBoings, and Engadgets of the Internet, all of which
are blog-like in format and have achieved enough recognition that
they are granted the same (if not better) access to primary industry
sources that so-called real journalists enjoy.
Remember, too, that the digital natives are not wedded to
traditional notions of publishing; to them a blog conveys just as
much legitimacy as a century-old print publication. With the ability
to post comments, corrections, arguments, cross-references, and
ame wars, etc., in some ways free online media sources are more
accurate and informative than traditional journalism.
TABLE 3.3 Magazine publishing trendsdrivers of and barriers to Magazine publishing trendsdrivers of and barriers to
Drivers for displacement of print Barriers to displacement of print
Decades-long trend away from print
version
Lower and lower cost of entry to pro-
duce magazines
Porting of magazine content to
branded apps
New print technologies (print-on-de-
mand) can make print economically
viable alternatives to nonprint
Portability of basic Web content on
smartphones, iPad
Strong legacy support for printed
magazines
Newspapers The newspaper industry went through similar
challenges as magazine publishers, but it is in even more desperate
shape. Like magazines, newspapers virtually ignored the Internet
until it was too late. For instance, in March 1999, an American
Journalism Review article titled State of The American Newspaper:
What Do Readers Really Want? concluded that the biggest
problem plaguing newspapers was news stories that jump to
different pages. The Internet is barely mentioned at all. Its hard
to imagine that no one saw the migration of eyeballs from print to
pixels; especially whenas we saw in Section IIit had happened
before. And most of us who lived through the 90s were already
ahead of this transition.
Like the magazine industry, newspaper publishers neglected to
charge for their online content from the outset, virtually ensuring
that no one would ever be able to charge for news content
online ever again. After all, the idea of charging for something,
especially something valuable, isnt really the issue. Its charging for
something after it used to be free that causes resistance. If The New
York Times had started charging for online access to its content the
minute it went online, the discussion would be completely different
here. But now, 15 years later, try as they might (and they have tried
charging for various types of content periodically), they cant get a
working paid-access model.
Now there is a free war among all the providers of national news.
If The New York Times starts charging, well, why not just go to
The Washington Post? Or even Yahoo! News or any of the other
umpteen-million online news sites and aggregators. The existence
29
of blogsespecially political onesalso precludes a pay-for-news
model because highly partisan readers tend to gravitate toward
their own pet blogs rather than mainstream news sites.
Attempts at electronic editions la Zinio (via a service called
NewsStand) have met with some success. The major national
newspapers have launched their own iPhone apps, and some
have launched special iPad apps, as well, as they, like magazine
publishers, are hoping that the iPad lends some of its luster to
newspaper publishing.
One of the complaints leveled against newspapers on the iPad
is publishers insistence on replicating a printed newspaper
electronically, especially when it is clear that the best apps are
those that play to the mediums strengths and put the emphasis on
content, not layout.
Another complaint is that some of the content-for-pay apps simply
re-presented content that is already available for free on the papers
Web site. (The justication appears to be that youre paying for the
presentation, which is a rather tough sell.)
Publishers seem to be of the opinion that the reading public will
pay for trusted content. Though that is a logical assumption, they
need to concede that consumers today dont place much trust in
content (i.e., journalism) anymore.
Another problem is that once newspaper publishers venture into
media like the iPad, they are competing with news sources that
got their start in newer media, like broadcast or cable news and
therefore already know how to develop content for multimedia
rather than print-centric delivery. So while The New York Times
Editors Choice iPad app is nice, it has only a fraction of the content
available on the actual Times Web site (which can be accessed on
the exact same device), and it isnt presented nearly as well as, say,
the National Public Radio (NPR) or BBC iPad apps.
TABLE 3.4 Newspaper publishing trendsdrivers of and barriers to Newspaper publishing trendsdrivers of and barriers to
Decades-long trend away from print
version thanks to competition from
TV, cable news, Internet
Lower cost of entry to produce news-
papers
Porting of newspaper content to
branded apps
New print technologies (print-on-de-
mand) can make print economically
viable alternatives to nonprint
Portability of basic Web content on
smartphones, iPad
Modest legacy support for printed
magazines
Competition from other news sources
(e.g. cable) on same platform
Local, alternative weekly, college papers
still relatively strong
Catalogs The shift in the catalog publishing industry took place
some time ago, and in many ways provides one of the great
multichannel success stories. In fact, several years ago Catalog Age
magazine changed its name to Multichannel Merchant, reecting
catalogers realization that they could no longer rely on a single
channel to reach a fragmented market. So they now complement
printed catalogs with e-mail blasts and e-newsletters, print direct
mail, cable channel programming, blogs, social media, etc.
30
A few catalog publishers also have iPad apps. Pottery Barn, for
example, distributes their iPad catalogs through Pixel Mags.
However, the rst thing you notice about the Pottery Barn iPad
catalog is that it takes about 15 minutes to download. In that time,
you could use the iPad to go to the Pottery Barn Web site, browse
their latest products, and complete a purchase. In addition, the
iPad catalog is slow and unresponsive, the navigation is less than
intuitivebut worse, you cant actually order anything through it.
You still have to go to potterybarn.com or call them.
IKEA also has an app, which is not optimized for the iPad, but
rather the iPhone. Like Pottery Barn, it downloads a very large
catalog45 MB, which takes a while. However, IKEA does let you
order items through the app.
Digital catalogs are nothing new; there were experiments with PDF-
based catalogs back in the early 2000s, and they, for good reason,
never caught on. Unless some more compelling and user-friendly
iteration appears, its hard to imagine that the iPad apps will gain
any traction. As in the aforementioned Pottery Barn example,
theyre simply a more complex and time-consuming way of doing
something that is actually very simple and fast to accomplish
already.
The displacement of printed catalogs has already largely taken
place, and will not likely continue much further. Catalog publishing
is a multichannel marketing strategy, and print will always play
a large role in that. Still, online catalogswhether online-only or
online as well as in printare playing an increasingly important
role, especially as e-commerce isnt an unfamiliar activity for
consumers that it was a decade ago.
Oxbridge Communications publishes the annual National Directory
of Catalogs, and in the 2010 edition, stated:
Online-only catalogs today number 2000, up from 869
ve years ago, reported MediaFinder.com, the largest
online database of U.S. and Canadian periodicals,
including data on 12,431 catalogs. During the same
time period, print catalogs declined from 3,836 to 1,158,
while the number of catalogs appearing in both print and
online formats increased from 6,661 to 8,640.
TABLE 3.5 Catalog publishing trendsdrivers of and barriers Catalog publishing trendsdrivers of and barriers
to displacement of print
Print catalog content displaced by
e-commerce more than 10 years ago
Print catalogs will always be an
important part of a larger multichannel
marketing strategy
Increasing comfort with e-commerce Print direct mail also supplements and
complements other media channels
E-mail and social media use by
catalogers
Modest legacy support for printed
catalogs
Increased comfort with e-commerce
on mobile devices
Lingering legacy fear of e-commerce
Text to Rich Media
The history of media changes in Western culture has been a steady
migration from static to dynamic content; that is, from text and
images to rich mediaanimation, video, audio. The telephone,
31
moving pictures, radio, television, videoall of these progressions
in the dissemination of content have worked steadily over the past
century and a half to displace static, printed content. The Internet
has been the rst medium (or multimedia platform) that melded the
old (text and graphics) with the new (rich media). Mobile devices
such as e-books, smartphones, and tablet computers take this trend
to its logical conclusion, and now a single devicean iPad, for
examplecan serve as book, magazine, newspaper, catalog, letter-
writing platform, video player, audio player, telephone.
When the printing press was invented in the 1450s, the population
of Europe was approximately 50 million people, and the
literacy rate at the time was estimated to be somewhere in the
neighborhood of 1 percentor 500,000 people capable of reading
a book. It took 100 years for the literacy rate to climb to 50 percent
(driven, in large part, by the advent of the printed book). By then,
the population had risen to 70 millionwhich means that it took
100 years for the number of people who could read what was
printed to hit 35 million. Thus, it took more than 100 years for the
users of print to reach 50 million. On the contrary, it took radio 38
years to reach 50 million users, and television 13 years to reach 50
million users. The Internet? Four years to reach 50 million users.
This goes back to the conversation earlier about the adoption rates for
new technologies. And new technologies, new ways of disseminating
content, inevitably take us farther away from print and paper.
The biggest growth area for rich media is online video. In
September 2010 alone more than 175 million U.S. users watched
online video. And more and more businesses are starting to
incorporate online video, and not just for ads. The gure below
illustrates features being offered by multichannel retailers.
FIGURE 3.2 Rich media features offered by U.S. multichannel retailers,
February 2010 (% of respondents)
New developments in print could help bridge this gap between
static and dynamic media. That is, electronic paper may not be a
metaphor; printable electronics or the ability to add small displays to
printed materials can make print rich, adding a visual component
that is only a short leap away from those greeting cards that play
songs when you open them. Where audio goes, video soon follows.
Other interactive print elements such as QR codes and Augmented
Reality use print as a jumping-off point for rich media experiences;
point a mobile phone camera at a printed code and launch a video,
a Web site, or some other interactive content.
TABLE 3.6 Text to rich mediadrivers of and barriers to Text to rich mediadrivers of and barriers to
E-book Developments
Elsewhere in this report, we have presented data on the sales of e-
books as compared to printed books, but a curious data point came
out from Amazon at the end of July 2010:
Over the past three months the company sold 143
Kindle books for every 100 hardback books. Kindle sales
accelerated in the past month alone, when the online
retailer said it sold 180 Kindle books for every 100
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32
hardbacks. The gures cover Amazons U.S. book business
and include hardback sales when there is no Kindle
edition and exclude free Kindle books.
Not bad for a technology that just ve years ago was believed to
be dead in the water. Libraries, too, are almost universally adding
e-books to their collections in response from what some say is
overwhelming demand from patrons. The process is not without
its challenges; competing e-book formats, draconian DRM (digital
rights management), and library-unfriendly pricing and licensing
schemes seem to be conspiring against them.
More and more bookstores, too, are adding e-books, as well as the
e-readers. In the U.K., Foyles and Waterstones offer Sony Readers
and compatible e-books. In the U.S., the two major chainsBarnes
& Noble and Bordersalso offer e-readers (Barnes & Nobles sells its
own Nook, and Borders offers the Sony Reader as well as a full line
of low-cost e-readers). Then, of course, there is Amazons Kindle and
the Apple iPad, the latter of which seamlessly interacts with the
Apple iBookstore.
Since 2006, e-books have leapt toward the mainstream, and while
they still represent a very small percentage of overall book sales they
are growing steadily and strongly. Juxtaposing the two gures below
book sales by category for 2008 and 2009, respectivelye-books have
gone from 0.5% of all book sales in 2008 to 1.0% in 2009.
FIGURE 3.3 Book categories as a percentage of book sales, 2008 (%)
Figure 3.4 shows the same book categories as above, but is
updated for 2009.
There are several barriers to e-books gaining traction in the
marketplace or displacing printed books. The rst is the variety
of formats and devices available (and that different titles tend
to be available for different devices, which is quite frustrating for
consumers).
Another major barrier is the price war that is shaping up, especially
where Amazon is concerned. Amazon lets publishers set their own
price for e-books, but Amazon is authorized to set the price for the
corresponding hardcover. Early e-book adopters (at least in the
U.S.) were comfortable with Amazons general at rate of $9.99 for
e-books, especially for new books, but publishers, not wanting to
get anyone used to that cost, began inching the price of an e-book
upward, so that now $14.99 or higher is the norm. Unfortunately,
Amazon discounts the hardcover enough that the e-book and the
printed hardcover are often the same priceand, in some cases,
the e-book is more expensive than the printed edition. This does
not make book buyers happy, who often voice their disapproval to
publishers and booksellers in user reviews for books. The argument
is, Why should a digital version cost the same as a version that
requires what many see as an expensive manufacturing process?
The following is an impromptu table that illustrates a problem with
e-book pricing, using a more or less random example. I recently
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33
bought a hardcover book called The Disappearing Spoon and Other
True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the
Periodic Table of the Elements. (I bought it at my local Barnes &
Noble, and, since I am a member of their readers club, I get 10%
off the list price.) Note the variation in pricing, depending on
where and in what format I purchased it.
TABLE 3.7 Book and e-book pricing variation ($)
Cover price Barnes & Noble
hardcover (with
10% discount)
Amazon
hardcover
Amazon
Kindle
e-book
iBook
e-book
24.99 22.49 14.61 11.99 11.99
Independent book publishing industry consultants continue to
foresee declines in printed book sales, and a rise in e-book sales. A
recent story in the Wall Street Journal reported:
Sales of consumer books peaked in 2008 at 1.63 billion
units and are expected to decline to 1.47 billion this year
and to 1.43 billion by 2012, says Albert Greco, a book-
industry market researcher. Currently, e-books account for an
estimated 8% of total book revenue, up from 3% to 5% a
year ago. Mike Shatzkin, a publishing consultant, estimates
e-books could be 20% to 25% of total unit sales by the end
of 2012. Eventually, digital books will overtake physical
books, says Greco.
FIGURE 3.5 Consumer-driven book sales for printed books, 2008-2009
(actual) and 2010-2015 (projected) (billion units)
FIGURE 3.6 Consumer-driven book sales for e-books, 2008-2009
(actual) and 2010-2015 (projected) (billion units)
E-book products are not just appealing to the younger generation:
Older readers are attracted to the technology because e-book
readers can make the font size bigger, helping visually impaired
readers easily create their own large-print editions.
However one looks at it, the market for e-books is growingand
traditional publishers run the risk of upstarts stealing their
market. Seth Godin, the renowned marketing guru and author,
recently made an announcement that, frustrated byamong other
thingsthe year-and-a-half lag time it takes to get a printed book
through a traditional publishing pipeline, he is going to self-publish
his own books. And no one can blame him; the ease and costs
of self-publishing (even in print) are pretty minimal these days,
and with e-books, there are even fewer production costs. The only
thing that traditional publishers have going for them, most of the
time, is marketing and, more important, access to distribution (its
difcult, if not impossible, for self-published authors to get into
chain bookstores). But with Amazon and e-commerce as outlets
for distribution, the one issue remaining for self-publishers is
marketing.
With e-books, were likely to see more titles by a diverse group of
authors who will likely sell in smaller volumes. There are already
emerging distributors of e-books (such as Lulu.com and Book Baby,
to name two) who will handle the distribution of e-books to places
like the Apple iBookstore.
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34
The printed book will continue to exist, but the e-book sales will
eventually catch up to itif the format wars, and DRM and pricing
issues can be resolved.
TABLE 3.8 E-book trendsdrivers of and barriers to displacement of print
E-books have nally hit the main-
stream with the new, high-quality
book readers.
Legacy love of printed books.
Integration of rich media with basic
book text as e-books evolve.
Gift books still largely printed-basedfor
aesthetic as well as logistical reasons.
Successive generations more and
more high-tech and comfortable with
new devices and media.
Competing formats, price wars, awful
DRM schemes still create frustration,
keeping some from pursuing e-books.
35
Introduction
In the previous sections of this report, weve looked at a number of
forces and technologies that both enable the displacement of print
and paper, and a few that disablethat is, technologies and trends
that help print and paper ght back. In this section, well look at
these enabling and disabling technologies a bit more methodically.
If you are heavily invested in the print and paper industry, the sad
truth is that there are more enabling technologies than disabling
ones. The good news, however, is that not all media are rendered
obsolete just because something new comes along. There will
always be a place for print in a high-tech, electronic world. It will be
a narrower place, to be sure. But the real trick is guring out how
print and paper can evolve and improve their value proposition to
consumers of media. The following section presents the formidable
challenges print faces, and the Disablers section will discuss new
print and hybrid/cyborg print applications.
For each of the items below, we will provide a brief synopsis of
what it is, how its growing (quantitatively, where possible), how
its enabling the displacement of print, and what, if any, potential
drawbacks it may have.
Enablers
The following items are some basic technologies that provide the
foundation for the displacement of print and paper. (Some of the
specic items in the other enabler categories will affect print in
direct ways; the items here are creating the environment that makes
the displacement of print a possibility.)
Internet What It Is: Means of connecting computers that allows
information and content to be transferred in a timely and, often,
as-needed basis.
How Its Growing: In 2009, according to the U.S. Census Bureau,
62 percent of the U.S. population used the Internet from home
trebling in 10 years. By one estimate, 28.7 percent of the world
population has Internet access.
How Its Displacing Print: The Internet has displaced print already
by providing an inexpensive and fast means of sending content
from documents to news and photosto any other computer
anywhere in the world.
Possible Drawbacks: 1. Viruses, malware, phishing, scams, frauds,
identity theft, porn, junk e-mail (spam), and other hazards of e-life
(many of which have ofine counterparts, as well) keep some
people from venturing online, or doing much there. 2. Fear of or
general opposition to technology. 3. Inability to afford Internet
access is common among impoverished populations.
Search What It Is: The use of a search engine to nd information
online. Web site designers, bloggers, and other creators of online
content use what is known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to
ensure that their pages come up toward the top of any search for
certain keywords. Advertisers can also pay to have their links come
up at the top of a search for certain keywordsthis is known as
Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
4
There will always
be a place for print
in a high-tech,
electronic world. It
will be a narrower
place, to be sure.
36
How Its Growing: By one estimate (not Googles), there are 34,000
Google searches per second, which works out to roughly 3 billion
per day.

Also, spending on search engine marketing will double in
the U.S. alone from $13 billion in 2009 to $26 billion by 2014.
How Its Displacing Print: Search has all but replaced most
directories, including phone directories. There is an argument to
be made that it has displaced many types of print marketing and
advertising applications, as potential customers can seek out the
items they are looking for rather than be passive recipients of
promotions and advertisements.
Possible Drawbacks: Too much information perhaps, or too much
unvetted information. Just because something turns up at the
top of a Google search doesnt necessarily mean that its the best
source of that information. Paid search clickthroughs often fail to
turn up anything helpful.
Broadband/WiFi What It Is: Broadband is a way of accessing
the Internet using a high-speed, wide-bandwidth connection; the
exact specications of that speed and bandwidth can vary widely.
Broadband connections are often provided via cable modem (often
via the same infrastructure that delivers cable television) or via
Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) connections. In general, broadband
is referred to as the high-speed alternative to a dial-up connection
over proper phone lines, which severely limits connection speed
(56,000 kilobits per second is the upper limit for dial-up);
broadband is at the very least twice that, or more often measured
in megabits per second. The U.S.s Federal Communication
Commissions (FCC) is implementing policies to make 100 megabits
per second the average U.S. broadband speed, six times todays
speed.
WiFi, short for wireless delity, has become a generic term for
any Internet connection that is accomplished without having to
hardwire a computer to the device providing Internet access. A
wireless or WiFi card installed in a computer (desktop or laptop)
picks up a signal from a wireless router that itself is hardwired to
the modem or other broadband connection device. Mobile device
such as iPhones, BlackBerrys, and others can access available WiFi
networks. WiFi is becoming more available in public places, such as
coffee shops, where customers used to linger over a coffee and a
printed newspaper.
Related to broadband and WiFi is 3G, a technology that allows
mobile devices to access the Internet over mobile phone carriers
own data networks. The 3G standard stipulates that the connection
must support a maximum of 200 kilobits per second. 3G networks
are used by smartphones or devices such as the iPad when a
wireless network is unavailable. Carriers charge for data transfer
over 3G networks. (The term 3G simply stands for third generation
and some companies are already starting to unroll 4G networks,
which could provide a maximum of 1 gigabit per second.)
How Its Growing: Worldwide, broadband penetration is only at
about 304 million, or 4.6 percent, it reaches up to one fourth or
even one third of the population in most industrialized nations
(32.8 percent in the Netherlands, 27.4 percent in South Korea,
37
27.2 percent in Sweden, for example). Some Asian countries and
cities (Seoul, Taipei, Hong Kong, Singapore) are the most wireless
in the world, and the West has been busy implementing similar
hotspots. Some airlines offer in-ight WiFi, another indication of
how essential the technology is becoming for businessand even
pleasure.
How Its Displacing Print: If the Internet provides an alternative
to the printed dissemination of information and content, then
fast and ultra-fast ways of connecting to the Internet hasten the
displacement of print by orders of magnitude. As mentioned earlier
in this report, WhatTheyThinks Dr. Joe Webb has calculated that, in
the U.S., for every additional hour of time spent online at home on
a broadband connection, the value of printing shipments declines
by $2. Bear in mind that this does not take into account Internet
access over 3G networks by mobile devices, which is havingas we
will see belowan even greater displacing effect.
Possible Drawbacks: Spotty WiFi access, often exorbitant
connection fees, and security concerns are sometimes cited as
barriers to broadband and WiFi adoption. Some U.S. cities (such
as Philadelphia) have tried to create free municipal WiFi networks,
which has been vehemently opposed by broadband providers. For
now, broadband and WiFi access are elusive to the poor, although
public libraries do provide access to online information.
Cloud Computing What It Is: The exact meaning of the term
cloud computing is rather nebulous. Basically, cloud computing
refers to a way of expanding Information Technologies (IT) capacity
and capabilities without having to add a physical infrastructure.
The cloud is essentially a shared infrastructure. Computing
resources like software and storage capacity are provided by an
external third party over the Internet. So instead of installing
servers and business applications, a company simply allows its
computers to access the cloud. Companies rent space in the cloud
and pay only for the resources they use. For small and midsize
businesses, cloud computing makes a great deal of economic
sense, as it allows them to avoid the expense of traditional IT.
Ultimately, it is computing as public utility. There are private clouds
and public clouds, the former for companies who have stringent
security requirements, for example, while a public considering to
cloud computing not only to comply with impending requirements
for electronic accessibility to health-care records but to do so
economically. One common term associated with cloud computing
is software as a service (SaaS), which refers to applications that run
over the Internet rather than as individual installable applications
on a single computer. Google Docs is one common example of SaaS.
How Its Growing: By some accounts cloud computing is expected
to see a CAGR of around 5 percent over the next ve years; and 30
percent of companies responding to an IDC survey are already in
the cloud, and 76 percent are actively working on cloud computing
projects.
How Its Displacing Print: Minimally, although as the shift from
desktop computing to cloud computing means that more computer
tasks are done virtually, the demand for packaged software will be
affected, which in turn affects the demand for software packaging
38
and the other printed documentation that accompanies it. In some
cases, the adoption of cloud computing (as in the case of health
care) is intended to replace paper records in a budget-conscious
way. The cloud itself is not driving the shift from paper, but it is
serving as a catalyst for the transition that is already in motion.
Possible Drawbacks: Security is the biggest barrier to cloud
computing. Indeed, a 2009 study of European CIOs found that
more than two thirds (68 percent) cited security fears as a chief
impediment to adopting cloud computing. Lack of reliability and
lack of transparency in pricing are also top barriers.
RFID What It Is: Short for radio frequency identication, RFID
refers to physical tags that contain electronic information and can
be read or scanned. Passports and other personal identication
documents are starting to use RFID tags to encode personal data
on those items, while it is used in supply-chain management
to track inventory. Some new implementations implant RFID in
mobile phones to allow them to serve as a way of linking to a bank
account and making payments.
How Its Growing: Not as briskly as was forecast ve years ago,
hampered by concerns over cost. Still, one report says the global
market for Radio Frequency Identication (RFID) products and
services in the pharmaceuticals industry [alone] was valued at
$112m in 2008 and is expected to grow to $884m in 2015 at a
CAGR of 34% over the same period. In other areas, the prediction
that by 2015 every retail product would have an RFID tag that
could track not only its movement through the supply chain but
also the movement of its buyer has not come to pass.
How Its Displacing Print: Ironically, ve years ago RFID was one of
those technologies that were seen as a great opportunity for the
printing industry, as the manufacturing process for RFID tags could
be integrated with traditional label and tag printing. That never
really happened, which is just as well, as the RFID market has not
taken off as strongly as many had hoped.
Possible Drawbacks: Low adoption, fears of identity theft (i.e.,
illegally reading RFID tags on personal documents and stealing
ones identity), fears of an Orwellian society tracking everyone
through RFID.
TABLE 4.1 Enablers and the displacement of print Enablers and the displacement of print
Media Enablers
The following are media enablers that use some of the above
technology enablers to further displace print and paper in specic
niches.
Web Sites What It Is: A location on the Internet that provides
information, entertainment, or other content. For many businesses,
a Web site functions as an electronic brochure.
How Its Growing: There is no single authority in charge of the Web,
so there is no central clearinghouse for Web sites, and thus getting
an accurate gauge of how many sites there are and at what rate
new ones are being added is difcult. The DNS system through
CLICK TO VIEW TABLE
39
which people register domain names is one rather oblique way,
although many domain names get registered for which no Web
site is ever developed. People often register specic domainsor
permutations of namesas a hedge against others someday
registering it, or for a short period of time, such as during elections
or prior to specic events like conferences.
Still, getting back to the question of how many actual Web
sites exist, a company called NetCraft regularly conducts Web
site surveys to try to determine the number. In October 2010,
their survey turned up 232,839,963 sites, with only a fraction
considered active sites.
How Its Displacing Print: Many products that used to be printed
are now simply available as Web sites. Product brochures, sell
sheets, marketing collateral materials, directoriesand this is not
to mention publishing products (magazines, books, newspapers,
catalogs). A good indicator is the decline of the reader service (or
bingo) card that used to beand sometimes still isincluded in
magazines; you circled a number on a business reply card that
corresponded to an ad or product mentioned in an article, sent it
off by mail, and, if you were exceedingly lucky, you got a printed
brochure in the mail in about 6 to 8 weeks. Now readers need only
to visit our Web site.
In the mid-1990s, the printing industry was expanding right along
with the general economy because of the dot-com boom. That was
because everyone who was launching a Web presence needed a
way to drive people onlineand they used print to do it. At rst.
So, to put it a bit melodramatically, the printers sowed the seeds
of their own destruction, especially after Google made its debut in
1999, and the idea of Search took off. Few people really needed
to use print to drive people online anymore.
Possible Drawbacks: Web sites have the same drawbacks that the
Internet in general has (fraud, scams, identity theft, viruses, etc.),
but one way that print can still remain relevant vis--vis the Web is
through new technologies like QR codes and Augmented Reality
(see Disablers below) that can integrate print and electronic
media much more closely. Printers can also avail themselves of the
promotional and inbound marketing potential of the Web for their
own services, as many have already done.
E-Mail What It Is: Well, given how many e-mail RFQs I have sent
out that never get responded to, it would be easy to assume that
printers have never heard of e-mail. In terms of commercial uses
for e-mail, e-mail marketing involves the sending of virtual yers
or newsletters via e-mail to a mailing list. Its not appreciably
different than print direct mail, except that by law recipients have
to have signed up to receive the e-mail, and they must be given the
opportunity to opt out should they desire to stop receiving such
messages.
How Its Growing: There are some who argue that e-mail marketing
has either hit a plateau or is, in fact, dying, but surveyssuch as
one by the UK Direct Marketing Associationstill consistently nd
that rumours of e-mails death have been greatly exaggerated.
The 2010 survey found that Most organisations surveyed here are
40
planning to increase budget on email marketing, with over 90%
believing it to be important or very important to their business.
How Its Displacing Print: Direct e-mail provides a more timely,
less expensive, and often more relevant way of communicating
with present and/or potential customers and prospects. The
inexpensive part of that equation cannot be emphasized strongly
enough. The economics of e-mail are such that since it is a very
small investment (the only major expense is if you have to buy a
mailing list), even responses and sales that would be considered
unacceptable with print direct mail can be considered a high return
on investment.
Possible Drawbacks: Actually, there are some crucial ones.
Generationally, e-mail may go the way of the handwritten letter
or the fax, as it has been repeatedly found that teens and young
adults rarely use e-mail, preferring to text on a mobile phone or
communicate via social media like Facebook. In fact, in a much-
bruited comment in June 2010, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg
estimated that Only 11% of teens e-mail each day, adding, E-mail
is probably going away. Then there is the question of spam; we
get so much of it (some of it even legitimate), and clogged inboxes
are reminiscent of the clogged physical mailboxes of yore, and its
hard not to get the sense that there is an e-mail fatigue setting in.
Does this mean that there is a renewed place for print? Its possible,
but its more likely that social media and geolocation services will
absorb any migration away from e-mail.
Blogs What It Is: Short for Web log, the blog began back in
the 1990s as a kind of online diary. Blogs have evolved into
hybrid magazine articles and op-ed pieces. The best blogs provide
information, opinion, and perspective on some area of interest.
They are written much more informally than a typical magazine
article and any given blog post is typically fairly short (less than
500 words). There is a form known as slow blogging that goes into
far more detail and can be the length of a magazine featurethat
is, around 3,0005,000 words. A key component of a blog is the
ability for readers to post comments; this becomes an important
way that a dialog and a sense of community are forged. Another
key component is to link to other blogs and sources of content.
How Its Growing: In 2006, blog watcher site Technorati counted its
50 millionth blog, and more recent numbers have put the number
of blogs in the blogosphere at 146,628,598. (Click through the
link in the footnote to see an interesting graphic that illustrates
the components of the blogosphere.) Is there money in blogging?
Not really; in fact, what has driven much of the growth of the
blogosphere has been the hobbyist passion and dedication to it,
even down to investing a great deal of time and money without
seeing much in the way of nancial reward. Which is kind of the
point of traditional blogging. For businesses, adding blogs to their
own Web sites puts a personal face on the business, and provides a
level of transparency for customers, allowing them to interact with
the company in a more effective way than traditional marketing
and PR efforts offer.
How Its Displacing Print: The impact of the blogosphere on print
has been a bit less direct than other new media, as it is one more
media channel for businesses to expend marketing dollars on.
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So in that sense, an investment in blogs (whether it be money or
just resources without a direct costthat is, bloggers are often
asked to blog for free) may take resources and money away from
a corresponding investment in a print campaign. In a more direct
way, blogs are replacing traditional printed newsletters, and even
whole publications. The biggest blog today is The Hufngton
Post, which, although technically a blog, is in many ways
indistinguishable from a more traditional news source. In fact,
some blogs and bloggers are starting to perform the same types of
investigative journalism as traditional mediathe technology blog
Gizmodo, for example, made headlines outside the blogosphere
when it landed an exclusive advance peek at the latest iPhone well
before it was ofcially unveiled.
Possible Drawbacks: Some have speculated over the years that
the blogosphere, being little more than what publishers call a big
slush pile, will eventually lose favor as readers want more trusted
sources information, and that Web 3.0 will see the return of the
expert. However, if the blogosphere is replaced by anythingand
its doubtful that it will be, at least for the presentit will be so-
called microblogging, that is, Twitter.
RSS What It Is: Short for Really Simple Syndication, RSS refers to
any of a series of formats used to automatically provide feeds, or
publish updated blog posts, news headlines, audio, and video to
subscribers. People subscribe to a favorite blog, podcast or content
Web sites RSS feed, and when the site is updated, the update/
link to the new material is pushed to the subscriber. Topic-based
feeds allow users to automatically receive personalized news and
headlines without users having to manually check sites for updates.
How Its Growing: RSS feeds have grown steady over the 2000s, but
since the advent of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, pure
RSS has become a little confused, since all of those social media
use RSS feeds to notify users about updated content. In many ways,
RSS is the raison dtre of social media.
How Its Displacing Print: Minimally, at least in a direct way, except
insofar as it is one of those technologies that makes electronic
media more effective, timely, and relevant for users. Actually, RSS
and related feed methodologies will more likely displace e-mail,
with e-blasts and e-newsletters replaced by RSS or social-media-
based feeds, which can be more relevant, without cluttering an
inboxand without the sender selling e-mail addresses to others.
Possible Drawbacks: Service outages have hit Facebook and Twitter,
disrupting feeds, and throwing power users into turmoil. There are
also viruses and other malware now associated with social media.
But the basic feed concept itself is fairly sound and effective.
Podcast What It Is: A podcast is really not much more than a radio
show, or a news, information, or entertainment program. The only
difference is that instead of being broadcast live (although some
are) over conventional radio, they are distributed on the Internet
as audio les. The easiest way to distribute a podcast is to upload
it to Apples iTunes Store, where users can subscribe and download
episodes as they become available. Podcasts can simply be offered
on ones own Web site, with alerts about new episodes sent via RSS
feeds.
42
How Its Growing: The best quantication of podcasts via Apples
iTunes Web site is hundreds of thousands. In 2009, eMarketer
projected the U.S. podcast audience will grow from 14.4 million
users in 2008 to 37.6 million in 2013. Mainstream media outlets
now routinely provide podcasts. Video podcasts are becoming more
prevalent, thanks to the availability of inexpensive video cameras
and, in fact, it is entirely possible to shoot and upload video in
minutes directly from the latest Apple iPhone.
How Its Displacing Print: Minimallyit is another media channel,
of course, but is more likely to impact traditional radio than print.
Possible Drawbacks: The plethora of choices can be a little
overwhelming, but for those who like to create and listen to audio
content about niche interests, there is little downside.
Social Media What It Is: Social media is a catchall term that refers
to a variety of networking sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and
Twitter. Facebook is a social-networking site where users create
proles of themselves, add friends, post status updates, share
photos, videos, and other links, and make connections literally
around the world. For businesses, the most relevant aspect of
Facebook is the fan page. That is, you create a prole, post status
updates, and encourage others to become fans, often via links
on other Web sites or blogs. Facebook status updates can also be
relayed back to a company or individuals main Web site.
Twitter is whats known as a microblogging site; it functions like
a blog, but posts can contain no more than 140 characters. Users
who have a Twitter feed attract followers and in turn follow
others. Twitter also fosters more or less real-time conversations,
and tweets (as Twitter posts are called) can be retweeted by a
particular users followers, which can attract other followers. New
additions to the site include the ability to add photos.
How Its Growing: Exponentiallythere are now more than 500
million active Facebook users, Twitter has 75 million users (not all
of them active), LinkedIn has more than 70 million users. This is
pretty amazing when you consider, as we saw in Table 3, that none
of these things existed just ve years ago.
How Its Displacing Print: Minimally, although, like many of these
items, it is another way of siphoning media dollars away from a
print component of a marketing or advertising campaign.
Possible Drawbacks: Social-media fatigue. That is, managing
social media, especially on a business level, takes time and
energy, and the rewards arent always immediately apparent. A
successful social-media initiative requires a strategy and consistent
maintenance. There is also a large chunk of the population
that just doesnt get social media and refuses to engage with it.
Generationally, though, social media will be the norm rather than
the exception, and weve already seen above the extent to which
it may displace even older forms of electronic communication in
addition to displacing print.
Video What It Is: Video material posted on the Internet, either on
YouTube (on which individual users can create their own channels
on which their videos run) or on an individual or companys own
43
Web site. Video can be recorded using high-end broadcast-quality
equipment or, increasingly, by a less-than-$150 video camera. In
fact, the latest Apple iPhone is perfectly suited to shooting and
uploading video. Inexpensive video editing software (such as the
Apple iMovie application, which is free) can be used to quickly edit
video and add professional-style transitions and graphic effects.
How Its Growing: Exponentially, especially now that Facebook
supports video viewing. ComScore has been tracking U.S. online
video viewing trends, and their most recent report, for September
2010, found that 175 million U.S. Internet users watched online
video content in September for an average of 14.4 hours per viewer.
The total U.S. Internet audience engaged in more than 5.2 billion
viewing sessions during the course of the month. Businesses are
also starting to add more and more video (and other rich media) to
their sites, and online news sources and blogs feature increasingly
more video content.
How Its Displacing Print: Minimally, at least in a direct way.
Again, its another media channel, and its another way for users
to consume content. Television stole consumers from books and
other printed materials starting in the 1950s; today, online video
is continuing that trend. And now that video can be streamed
fairly effortlessly on mobile phones and iPadsbecoming almost as
portable as printit will be a much more disruptive technology.
Possible Drawbacks: High bandwidth is required for uploading/
accessing video. Presently, the Apple/Adobe Flash war also makes
video that much less accessible (Apple portable devices like
iPhones and iPads do not support Flash video, rendering a great
deal of online video unviewable).
Geolocation What It Is: A type of social networking that lets
users update their physical location using mobile versions of
location apps or text messaging. This is aided and abetted by the
GPS capabilities of the latest generations of smartphones. A user
checks in at a venue (like a coffee shop) using a mobile Web site,
text messaging, or specic application, and is awarded points and
sometimes badges. Location-based services can be thought of as a
marketing tool for companies.
How Its Growing: Slowly...right now. Most users have never heard
of these sites.
How Its Displacing Print: Not at all, at the moment.
Possible Drawbacks: Without observing heavy use of location-
based services in the wild, its tough to say if there is a weak point
beyond simply low interest/awareness.
TABLE 4.2 Media enablers and the displacement of print Media enablers and the displacement of print
Electronic Device Enablers
Many, if not all, the items below also fall into some of the above
categories, and the reason they are enablers of the displacement
of print is that the Internet, social media, e-mail, video, and all the
media enablers cited above can be accessed on these devices.
CLICK TO VIEW TABLE
44
E-Readers and E-books What It Is: A portable electronic device
that can be used to purchase, download, and read books and other
publication content (like newspapers). The size of a large paperback
book, many of these e-readers use a reective display called e-paper
(or electronic paper developed by a company called E Ink) that
simulates ink on paper. The Amazon Kindle is perhaps the best
known of these devices.
How Its Growing: Exponentially. Sales gures for e-books were
outlined in Section III of this report, which show that they are one
of the major growth areas in book publishing today. Price cuts
on the e-readers have stimulated sales, and the appearance of
e-readers at the lower end of the market, offering no-frills devices
with the same display capabilities as their higher-end brethren, is
also expected to kick-start the market. In the U.S., public libraries
are seeing increased demand for e-books.
How Its Displacing Print: Potential cannibalization of print book
sales; modest in the short term, quite severe in the long term. Rise
of self-e-publishing will transform the book publishing industry in
many varied iterations.
Possible Drawbacks: Legacy love of printed books. Competing
formats, draconian DRM, and pricing controversies will impede
short-term growth of e-books, but growth data suggest these are
not the technology killers they were a decade ago when e-books
rst appeared. Also, as tablet PCs (see below) become more
available and can do more things, single-use devices like e-book
readers may become pass. Also, at present, the electronic paper
technology cannot handle color or videotwo potentially deadly
omissions. Interestingly, cultivating an interest in e-books may help
lure readers back to books in general, which may benet print
books in the long run.
Smartphones What It Is: A smartphone is roughly dened as
a mobile phone that can also access the Internet to send and
receive e-mail, access the Web, and take advantage of apps to
add functionality in a bewildering variety of categories. Most have
cameras, some even have video cameras. The Apple iPhone, RIM
BlackBerry, and Google Android phones are the most prevalent
models in this category.
How Its Growing: Exponentially. According to InfoWorld in August
2010: [W]orldwide smartphone sales grew by 50 percent during
the second quarter...Googles Android...became the third largest
operating system, and sales passed 10 million units for the rst
time, according Gartner....The Android camp managed to sell 10.6
million smartphones during the second quarter [of 2010], up from
about 755,900 a year ago and 5.2 million during the rst three
months of 2010. Sales are still mainly driven by North America,
where Android is now the number-one platform. And eMarketer
says, The percentage of U.S. consumers thinking about buying a
smartphone has doubled since the beginning of 2008, according to
ChangeWave Research, and Nielsen expects smartphones to be in
the hands of half of U.S. mobile users by the end of Q3 2011. And
thats just the U.S.
How Its Displacing Print: Substantially. The ability to make
45
the Internet portable has already had severe repercussions for
publishers of all kinds. Advertisers and marketers see mobile as
the growth area, with app development the primary means of
capitalizing on the penetration of smartphones. Studies (cited in
Section II) have found resistance to mobile ads, but apps that can
add useful, informative, or at least entertaining functionality to
their phones are more and more a part of businesses marketing
strategies. This is on top of the older use of SMS text messaging
as a marketing vehicle, which has been of limited usefulness given
the often exorbitant rates carriers charge for text messaging. Still,
campaigns in which users are encouraged (often by a print ad,
poster, or billboard) to text some kind of response to a marketer
(often for a chance to win a prize) have proven popular, especially
among teens and young adults.
Possible Drawbacks: Spotty coverage and lack of WiFi hotspots.
Other than that, there are few barriers to the continued
proliferation of smartphones.
Tablet Computers What It Is: Bigger than a PDA, smaller than
most laptops, a tablet is a computer with which the user interacts
by means of a touchscreen (early models used a stylus for the
user interface). This class of computerwhich has been around
since the 1980s but didnt nd a marketwas kick-started in 2010
by the Apple iPad, which was in many ways a larger version of
its iPhone. A true mobile device, the iPad (and newer tablet PCs
like the forthcoming RIM PlayBook, Samsung Galaxy Tab, and
the now-available Dell Streak) can all access the Internet either
via WiFi or by a wireless carriers data network, run apps, and
even function as proper computers, with the ability to run word
processors, spreadsheets, even presentations (the iPad can connect
to a VGA projector and run Apples Keynote presentation app).
Tablet PCs can also function as entertainment centers, running
video, streaming TV programs from the Internet, playing music, and
reading books, magazines, and newspapers.
How Its Growing: The iPad sold three million units in less than
three months, and while few true competitor models have yet to
ship, there is a great deal of expectation and anticipation. They
have been getting a lot of press, and while the market is still fairly
small, it is expected to grow.
How Its Displacing Print: If smartphones made Internet content
virtually as portable as print, then tablet PCs go one better and
make Internet content as portable as print and at a form factor
that is easier to read, navigate, and interact with. It also offers,
in one place, the ability to access almost every type of content
imaginablebooks, magazines, newspapers, video, e-mail, the
Web...and all the games and other things that the thousands
of apps allow. Consider this nding, recently touted by Folio:
magazine:
Consumers who own tablets and other e-readers
generally spend 50 percent more time reading magazines
(presumably on those devices) than consumers who do
not own those devices, according to the results of a survey
released this week from market research rm the Harrison
Group, digital magazine vendor Zinio and Qualcomm, a
mobile-device display manufacturer.
46
Possible Drawbacks: Small market share for now, and reluctance
on the part of consumers to overwhelmingly embrace a new
technology that is less than one year old. And, as with e-books,
getting a reading audience attracted to magazines and other
content may very well translate to at least some renewed interest in
the corresponding print products.
TABLE 4.3 Electronic device enablers and the displacement of print Electronic device enablers and the displacement of print
Display Enablers
Until the latter half of the twentieth century, there were few display
media that could rival paper for ease of use, quality of display,
and low cost. But in the past 20 years, new types of displays have
attempted to provide an alternative to paper, with varying degrees
of success. The development and commercialization of so-called
electronic paper was a breakthrough, and its incorporation in the
Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader have kick-started the e-book
reader market (see above).
In the long run, it may be a moot point, as younger users dont
have the problems reading on screen the way adults who did not
grow up with such devices do. The complaint, I hate reading on a
computer screen is rarely heard by anyone under 25. So a display
that mimics paper may only be an issue for older folks.
Flexible Displays What It Is: A computer display that is similar
in form and feel to a sheet of paper or, more commonly, a sheet
of plastic, such as acetate. It can be bent and rolled, and yet still
display electronic information from an attached computer. There is
a wide variety of technologies designed to accomplish thisthe E
Ink brand of electronic paper cited previously in the E-Books and
E-Book Readers section is onebut few have yet to get beyond the
prototype stage.
How Its Growing: Extremely slowlythe E Ink technology has thus
far been the only commercially available implementation of exible
displays, and yet the e-book readers in which it has been integrated
could scarcely be considered exible. In 2003 and 2004, numerous
prototypes, most coming out of Asia, featured both color and black-
and-white displays. OLED (organic light-emitting diode) displays
were also a highly touted version of exible display technology
that hasnt quite yet lived up to their early promise. Some proof-of-
concept displays were quite astounding, but many had exorbitant
manufacturing costs that made commercialization virtually
impossible. The success of the Amazon Kindle and other e-paper-
based readers has helped generate renewed interest in this kind of
display, but at the same time the success of the Apple iPad, which
does not feature what would be considered a exible display or
electronic paper, has likely caused many to rethink their approach
to exible displays. A colour e-paper display from Fujitsu called the
FLEPia was announced in 2009 and shown in early 2010 in Asia,
but there has been no news since then (as of this writing).
How Its Displacing Print: Modestly for now, but potentially
substantially. E-paper, thanks to the Kindle and the other E Ink-
based e-book readers have stimulated the market for e-books; the
introduction of lower-cost e-readers like the Kobo eReader, Alluratek
Libre, and others will also help drive interest in e-books at the
CLICK TO VIEW TABLE
47
expense of print.
Possible Drawbacks: Lack of development beyond the prototype
stage; high cost of manufacture; inability to support video refresh
rates or even, in some cases, colour displays; competition from
tablet PCs and smartphones.
3D Displays What It Is: While 3D as a form of entertainment
had its original heyday in the 1950s, as seen in those famous
photos of perhaps silly-looking, bespectacled moviegoers gawking
to It Came From Outer Space, it was a short-lived fad--until 2009s
Avatar suddenly made 3D all the rage again. Shortly after came
the release of televisions and other types of displays that provided
a three-dimensional viewing experience, some (but not all, or even
most) without the need to wear cumbersome cardboard glassesat
least in theory. Corresponding video titles that are lmed in 3D
are also emerging, but the paucity of 3D content, the need to
wear those glasses, and a consumer populace still in the process of
upgrading to HDTV are hampering penetration.
How Its Growing: Slowly. Sales gures are hard to come by (its still
a very new technology), but Dixons, a UK retail chain, announced
in October 2010 that for the rst time it had a week of 3D TV sales
in ve gures. The actual gure was not released.
How Its Displacing Print: Not at all.
Possible Drawbacks: Lack of 3D content, need to wear special
glasses (in most cases), lack of tremendous consumer interest.
TABLE 4.4 Display enablers and the displacement of print Display enablers and the displacement of print
Disablers
What are those technologies that can help print ght back against
the onslaught from electronic media? There are two primary
objectives that print has to accomplish if it is to compete with
digitally delivered content:
1. Timeliness
2. Relevance
Electronic media, and especially social media, have the edge on
print because messages can be disseminated and delivered almost
as fast as they can be created. Heres an example of what print is
up against:
In early February 2010, the Snowpocalypse hit the East Coast
of the United States, with record blizzards in Washington D.C.,
Philadelphia, and along the Eastern seaboard. Many restaurants,
as usually happens during massive blizzards, shut down for a
day or two. But for some, they took advantage of the situation.
One restaurant in Philadelphia launched its own social-media
advertising blizzard. As was reported February 12, 2010, on NPRs
Morning Edition:
...Jonathan Adams, executive chef of the Pub and Kitchen
in Philadelphia, made lemonade out of lemons with an
ad hoc advertising campaign. We launched a full-frontal
social-networking assault on Monday and Tuesday via
Facebook and Twitter, in particular, and really got the
word out that this place would be open. When other
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48
restaurants closed down, customers ocked to the Pub and
Kitchen and spent the day consuming mass quantities....
We probably doubled our sales yesterday of what we
normally do on a Wednesday. It felt like a Saturday.
Thats the sort of thing marketers are doing all the time, albeit a
tad less dramatically. Print is not as nimble. But this is not to say
that print cant play the timeliness and relevance game. It just has
to do it on its own terms. As a result, there are some preexisting,
and some emerging, technologies that can help.
Print On Demand What It Is: The ability to print a small number
of copieseven just a single copy. Print on demand (also known
as just-in-time printing) is often done using digital presses, but
doesnt necessarily have to be. VistaPrint, for example, the most
successful commodity printer, can cost-effectively print small runs of
items such as business cards thanks to a sophisticated MIS system
that gangs multiple jobs with the same specs and parameters. The
ability to print limited numbers of documents or publications can
be cost-effective, and potentially more effective if the printing is
combined with a targeted approach to distribution (such as via
some type of customisation, personalisation, or other form of one-
to-one marketing).
How Its Growing: Well. Earlier this year, Pira published a report
called Analogue-to-Digital Printing: Navigating the Transition,
which cited the following forecasts:
The Printing Industries of America (PIA) has forecast the
aggregate shipment value of digital vs. traditional printing
for 2014/2015 as well as composition of sales.
TABLE 4.5 Annual printing shipment value, 2010 and 2015 (US$ million) Annual printing shipment value, 2010 and 2015 (US$ million)
2010 2015
Conventional 3.4 3.6
Digital 0.6 0.9
Ancillary 0.6 0.7
Total 4.6 5.2
Source: PIA
TABLE 4.6 Composition of sales for a typical printer, 2010 and 2015 (%) Composition of sales for a typical printer, 2010 and 2015 (%)
2010 2015
Ancillary 12 14
Digital 12 17
Conventional 76 69
Total 100 100
Source: PIA
How It Can Help: Timeliness and relevance are two drivers of
electronic media (as per the Snowpocalypse example cited
previously). Print on demand may not be as timely as e-mail, but
not all content dissemination schemes need to be turned around
as quickly. For publishers, the potential of print on demand has
scarcely been tapped. On-demand books could solve the two
biggest headaches of the book publishing industry: inventory
and returns. Imagine a time when a bricks-and-mortar bookstore
had a digital press in the back, hooked up to a database of every
available title. A customer comes into the shop, looking for a
title, and it can be printed and bound while s/he waits. Whether
bookstores want to get into the commercial printing business
is questionable, but there is no doubt that this modelalready
available onlinecould help ailing bookstores, as well as publishers.
49
Applying a similar model to magazine and newspapers would also
be possible; a news kiosk equipped with a digital press can output a
customized version of a daily newspaper or magazine, whose preferred
content has been ordered online or even via a mobile phone.
Innite scenarios are possible, but the point is that print-on-
demand applications can help the producers of documents achieve
timeliness and relevance for users.
Printed Electronics What It Is: Using more or less traditional
printing processes to apply electronic components to a substrate
(most often plastic or textiles, but paper can be used as well),
usually comprising some kind of semiconducting organic polymer
or conductive ink. RFID (see enablers previously) is one common
example, but other applications include certain types of exible
displays, smart tags, toys, clothing, and other such things.
Is It Growing? In some ways, this category has already grown;
look inside any electronic device and youll likely see some kind of
printed material. Printed electronics has been a stealth application
of print for quite some time, and its only now that splashier
applications have become more visible. At the 2010 GlobalTronics
expo, Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology research
scientist Albert Lu said traditional electronics will not be completely
replaced by printed electronics in the foreseeable future, but said
that the market for printed, thin-lm and organic electronics was
predicted to hit $1.92 billion in 2010, of which printed electronics
would account for about 35 percent. In 10 years, he said, this
market would balloon to $55.1 billion, with printed electronics
accounting for 71 percent.
How It Can Help: As this report has shown, electronic media and
content are growing, and thus the demand for electronic devices
and appliances of all kinds is growing as well. The ability to produce
electronics in a high-volume, low-cost manner is a no-brainer.
Applications in packaging, labels and tags, even publishing, are
myriad. Electronic paper applications that fuse electronics with
conventional paper create dynamic printed applications that can
overcome the limitations of traditional ink-on-paper printing in
regard to timeliness and relevance. Printed electronic displays
can vary the message dynamically and also address the more
ephemeral coolness factor, an important consideration when
thinking about new media and new forms of disseminating content.
Quick Response (QR) What it Is: Essentially, a sophisticated bar
code that is printed on a poster, billboard, advertisement, book,
etc., that, when photographed with a mobile-phone camera or
Webcam linked to a special QR code app, launches a Web site, a
video, an animation, or some other type of electronic or interactive
application. Many people have started adding QR codes to ads
and even business cards to make it easy for potential customers or
consumers to access a Web site on their mobiles without needing
to manually type in an unwieldy URL. In real estate, QR codes are
applied to For Sale signs and can take potential homebuyers on an
interactive tour of the property. QR codes are also known as 2D bar
codes or matrix codes.
FIGURE 4.1 Sample QR code
CLICK TO VIEW
50
Is It Growing? Most denitely. QR codes have become very big in
Asia (quite literally; they often adorn billboards and other outdoor
advertising materials) and are now starting to proliferate in Europe
and the U.S. At several interactive advertising and marketing shows
in the past year in the U.S., QR codes were one of the hottest topics.
At some printing shows (including Ipex in May 2010), QR codes
have at least been conspicuous if not highly touted as a way to
help printers make print more interactive. Said Val DiGiaconto of
the U.S.s Ace Group, in an interview with WhatTheyThink in June
2010: QR Codes were named the marketing trend of the year in
the UK for 2009. My prediction is they will be the marketing trend
of the year in the U.S. for 2010. It is in its infancy in the U.S. and
there is lots of room for growth. We had predicted a lot of growth in
2010 but we were surprised by how much awareness and adoption
we have seen in just the rst four months of the year. We are also
in talks with a company that does augmented reality software and
are looking for ways to combine the two.
How It Can Help: It may not seem like a hot, interactive technology
(it looks rather like a mutant crossword), but QR codes are an easy,
inexpensive way to make print timely, relevant, and interactive. The
proliferation of smartphones (detailed elsewhere in this report) is
also a factor driving the use of QR codes. Although QR codes are
increasing in visibility, they are still a gray area to many marketers,
advertisers, and content producers, which puts savvy printers in
a good position to educate potential clients about how print and
electronic media can be bound together using these codes.
Augmented Reality (AR) What It Is: Related to QR, augmented
reality (AR) uses printed codes or tags in the physical environment to
launch electronic applications on a computer or mobile phone and
has the potential to make print the ultimate in interactive media.
Companies such as Best Buy and Procter & Gamble are already starting
to incorporate AR into print ads. When users aim their smartphones
cameras at those ads, a 3D visual experience is launched.
There are a few examples of real-world AR. The rst involves
augmented baseball cards:
Since the 1950s, Topps has sold baseball trading cards
lled with photos and stats to bring the game to life.
Now, the company is actually bringing its cards to life. In
March 2009, collectors who held a special Topps 3D Live
baseball card in front of a Webcam were able to see a
three-dimensional avatar of the player on their computer
screen. If the card was rotated, the gure would rotate in
full perspective using augmented reality.
Another example was showcased at the Frankfurt Book Fair and
demonstrated how a pop-up book can pop even more:
A company called Metaio uses a Webcam and a custom
piece of camera recognition software to make a 3D
world appear on your computers screen. The companys
Augmented Reality technology was shown off at the
Frankfurt Book Fair with an upcoming interactive 3D book
called Aliens & UFOs, which superimposes planets and
alien spacecraft on the page when the book is held up to
the Webcam.
51
These examples have not yet come to mobile phones. But mobile
AR technology is coming quickly. An application environment for
mobiles called Layar uses a combination of phone camera and GPS
information to annotate the world around the user.
Is It Growing? Yes. One study released last year by ABI Research
said that the technology is poised to grow from generating $6
million in revenue in 2008 to $350 million in 2014 for marketers.
This is just a forecast, of course, but the potential for growth is
certainly there.
How It Can Help: As with QR codes, AR can make print timely,
relevant, interactive and cool. And also like QR codes, AR is still
an unknown quantity for the majority of users, so there is an
opportunity (admittedly short-lived) to get in on the ground oor
and become a technology leader and guru rather than wait until
everyone else is already doing something with AR.
As with any of these Enablersor any new technologythe
opportunity for those working with print and paper is to develop
compelling applications that meld print with interactive media
to provide a unique experience for users. There are few rules
associated with any of these things, which gives the savvy and the
curious a great deal of freedom in carving out unique niches and
becoming leaders and educators in the eld.

52
Introduction
With all the electronic alternatives now swirling around the
market, what does the future hold for paper? Naturally, different
print and paper applications will be affected in different ways;
the following is a general prediction of where paper will be for
a variety of printed materials through 2020. However, to put
future displacement in context, we need to look at what degree
of electronic displacement has already occurred. So for both past
displacement and potential future displacement, we use the
following four symbols:
N= Negligible or no displacement of/impact on print/paper by
electronic media (<1 percent)
L=Low displacement (<33 percent)
M=Moderate displacement (33-66 percent)
H=High displacement (66-99 percent)
It is doubtful that there will ever be complete, 100 percent
displacement of anything by anything else, certainly not in 10 years.

We also need to be careful of the denition of displacement. Does
it mean, for example, people swapping printed books for electronic
books, or people giving up printed books to do something else,
like watch television? We will try to conne ourselves to the
formerthe idea of electronic application displacing printed
applicationwhile remaining aware that the latter is a very serious
force in a multimedia culture, just as in the past we saw that
cable television news had a large and direct impact on newspaper
circulation.
Books
In the past 10 years, the demand for printed books has scarcely
been affected by the presence and availability of e-books, and even
in the past ve years, the growth of e-books has not come at the
expense of printed books, at least not to any great degree. However,
now that e-books are starting to represent a greater and greater
chunk of book sales, the potential for displacement looms larger in
the next decade. However, and this is a bit ironic, e-books have the
potential to lure users away from other mediapeople who were
never consumers of printed books to begin with. Thats good news if
youre a book publisher, bad news if youre a book printer.
TABLE 5.1 Bookspast and future print displacement Bookspast and future print displacement
Type of books Degree of past
displacement of
print (1990-2000)
Potential future
displacement of
print (2010-2020)
General trade books (adult/YA) N M
Textbooks M H
Scholarly and reference books H H
Catalogs
While there is still no shortage of printed catalogs, catalogers need
to be true multichannel merchants who avail themselves of every
possible medium to reach potential customers. On an overall net
volume basis, catalogs appear to be declining: Even though there
are new entries into the marketplace, there are simultaneous cuts
by existing catalogs. A shift to digitally printed and more relevant/
personalized catalogs could very well help catalogers, but few have
availed themselves of it.
5
With all the
electronic
alternatives now
swirling around the
market, what does
the future hold for
paper?
53
TABLE 5.2 Catalogspast and future print displacement Catalogspast and future print displacement
Type of catalogs Degree of past displace-
ment of print (1990-
2000)
Potential future
(2010-2020)
B2C catalogs M L
B2B catalogs H M
Directories
Past displacement has already been profound, and any future
displacement will likely eliminate those few printed directories that
do still exist. Mobile telephony is rapidly replacing traditional landline
telephones, and that creates logistical problems for publishing printed
phone directoriesin the past, a single phone company handled all
local service and could thus coordinate local phone directories. And
as for the Yellow Pages (business telephone listings), its telling that
the Yellow Pages has an online tool as well as an iPhone app.
Telephone books arent the only directories, but most others are
easily supplanted by a simple Google search or an online directory.
As we said earlier, nothing will ever be 100 percent displaced, but
printed directories will likely come close.
TABLE 5.3 Directoriespast and future print displacement Directoriespast and future print displacement
Type of directories Degree of past
(1990-2000)
Potential future
(2010-2020)
Telephone directories M H
Other directories H H
Magazines
Weve seen elsewhere in this report that print magazines, along
with their ad pages and circulation, are all declining, in many ways
due to the migration of content online. Its not necessarily true to
say that electronic versions of the same content are displacing print
versions, but in a large number of cases, that is the situation. At
the same time, online-only e-zines such as Salon and Slate have
become high-prole titles, and blogs are often taking the same
role that magazines once did. Publishers are looking to iPad apps
to recover dropping readership and revenues, but it remains to be
seen whether that will be a winning strategy.
TABLE 5.4 Magazinespast and future print displacement Magazinespast and future print displacement
Type of magazines Degree of past
(1990-2000)
Potential future
(2010-2020)
Consumer M H
B2B H H
Newspapers
Like magazines, newspapers have seen their ad pages and
circulations drop over the past two decades, as more consumers
migrate to online news sources. At the same time, newspapers are
gambling that the iPad and tablet computer apps will be their
salvation, but since their free Web site content is available on the
exact same device, its difcult to see how they can make such
a strategy work without providing some sort of added value to
subscribers. Newspapers now face competition not only from TV
and cable news providers like the BBC and CNN, but also from
54
online news aggregators like Yahoo! and Google, as well as blogs.
There are just so many places to get news onlineand the same basic
newsthat newspapers have little to trade on except their brand.
Curiously, college papers have weathered the storm pretty wellan
odd nding given that wed think that a young, tech-savvy audience
would eschew a printed paper. Perhaps this is a case of a captive,
well-dened audience.
TABLE 5.5 Newspaperspast and future print displacement Newspaperspast and future print displacement
Type of newspapers Degree of past displace-
2000)
Potential future
(2010-2020)
National M M
Local/community L M
Alternative weeklies L M
College L M
Legal, Financial
Anyone who has ever bought or sold a house knows rsthand that
paper is here to stay. For legal reasons, such documents have been
slow to move to electronic media, although its not difcult to
envision transition in the next 10 years. Financial documents have
already been transitioning to electronic form, and its now common
to see a nancial statement with implore the recipient to go
paperless. This will only accelerate in the next 10 years, and will
linger only as long as a percentage of the population remains leery
of electronic nancial documents.
Interestingly, checks may become a thing of the past; direct deposit
has been around for decades, but even for independent contractors,
electronic transfer of funds is becoming more common. Some banks
now also let you photograph a check with a mobile-phone camera
and upload it to the bank as a deposit. How soon before the
physical check is taken out of the picture entirely? In some parts of
the world, such as Kenya and other parts of Africa, printed money
is no longer used. A system called M-Pesa is a mobile-phone-based
money system that transfers funds from handset to handsetno
bank is even involved!
TABLE 5.6 Financial and legal documentspast and Financial and legal documentspast and
future print displacement
Type of documents Degree of past displace-
2000)
Potential future
(2010-2020)
Legal forms L M
Financial statements
and bills
H H
Tax forms L M
Manuals and Technical Documents
In the 1990s, it became common for software companies to
replace their printed manuals with a PDF contained on a CD/
DVD included in the software box. If you have bought software,
especially Adobe software, in the recent past you likely simply just
downloaded the software and found user documentation via an
online Help system. This method of distribution has now become so
common that a U.S. book publisher, OReilly, has a successful line of
computer books called The Missing Manual series.
55
It is not uncommon to nd other instruction manuals online,
as well, which is obviously a great relief to the consumer who
inevitably misplaces such things. Other types of technical
documentation is also increasinglyif not entirelyelectronic. In
the early 2000s, Marconi began supplying its service manuals for
repairmen on PDAswhich are most certainly easier to hang onto
than bulky binders when clambering up utility poles.
TABLE 5.7 Manuals and technical documents Manuals and technical documents
past and future print displacement
Type of documents Degree of past
(1990-2000)
Potential future
(2010-2020)
Operators manuals M H
Other technical docu-
ments
M H
Advertising
Advertising generally falls under the categories of publishing,
except for applications like signage and direct mail.
Signage At one time, it would be tempting to say that signage,
billboards, and other types of outdoor advertising could never
be replaced by electronic media. But in some places, electronic
displays have replaced billboards, transportation shelter graphics,
and other forms of signage. The advantage of electronic media
for these applications is timeliness. Although this is still largely
theoretical, the idea is to sell outdoor advertising much like radio
or TV spotsin dayparts. A static printed billboard is there for the
duration, but an electronic billboard can vary its content over the
course of a day so if it is along a heavily traversed commuter route,
the owner of the signage can charge more for rush-hour displays
than for other times of day. And advertisers can vary the message
as they need to, giving a nod to the classic adage If its raining,
sell umbrellas. Also, ad tie-ins can be much more relevant to what
is happening literally to the hour the ad goes upa football match,
a major world event, the weather. In-store advertisements can also
use electronic signagein lieu of, or in addition to, the in-store TV
programming some shops already use.
Technology is just beginning to develop these kinds of applications,
and in the next 10 years, such types of signage will become
commonplace.
Direct Mail Given the travails of direct e-mail and how younger
users (and even some older high-tech users) are starting to avoid
e-mail as a means of communication, is it possible that direct mail
will make a return?
Well, in some sense, it hasnt really gone away. Volume has
dropped, but marketers still consistently maintain that print direct
mail is a vital part of any campaign, and the most successful direct
mail materials sit comfortably alongside e-mail, social, and other
media. The saving grace of direct mail, perhaps, has been the
advent of digital printing, which can go a long way toward the
timeliness and relevance requirements of todays market. Targeted,
perhaps customized or personalized, but in shorter, less expensive
runs, to be sure. Transpromotional also falls into this category, but
56
will likely be a victim of paperless billingif by transpromotional we
mean those ads that delay the download of an online statement.
TABLE 5.8 Advertising materialspast and future print displacement Advertising materialspast and future print displacement
(1990-2000)
Potential future
(2010-2020)
Signage N M
Print direct mail M M
Transpromotional M H
Commercial Printing
If there is one print application that has taken a beating at the
hands of electronic media, it has been general commercial printing.
Product brochures? Go to a Web site or download a PDF. Travel
brochures? Go to the Chamber of Commerce Web site or, better yet,
use a mobile app called Yelp! or AroundMe to get recommendations
on dining and travel. Sell sheets? Go online, although, to be fair,
print-on-demand is helping out this print product category. Menus?
Theyre status quo for the time being, but some upscale restaurants
have already started handing out wine lists on iPads. And its
easy enough now to check out a restaurants online menu from
an iPhone before venturing out therehow soon before restaurant
menus become electronic? In fact, the ubiquitous takeout menus
stuffed into doors or mail slots may very well be replaced by online
food ordering from Web-based menus. Some fast-food chains
already let you order from a smartphone app.
In the next 10 years, it is entirely probable that the entire
commercial printing industry will evolve (or devolve, some would
say) into an industry of specialized niches.
TABLE 5.9 General commercial printingpast and future General commercial printingpast and future
print displacement
2000)
Potential future
(2010-2020)
Product brochures H M
Flyers H H
Ofce Stationery
There are two things happening with ofce stationery (here,
letterhead, envelopes, and business cards). While e-mail, instant
messaging, and social media have all done away with a good
chunk of the need for letterhead and even envelopes, most of these
items can be printed as needed on an ofce desktop or network
printer using simple Word templates. Business cards are and will
remain a robust print application, as long as people still meet in
person. Whether anyone ever refers to a printed business card
versus a LinkedIn contact or an e-mail signature le is irrelevant;
the business card will remain a vitalif almost entirely symbolic
business accessory.
57
TABLE 5.10 Ofce printingpast and future print displacement Ofce printingpast and future print displacement
2000)
Potential future
(2010-2020)
Letterhead H H
Envelopes M H
Business cards N L
Security Printing
Security printingchecks, credit cards, passports, drivers licenses,
and other secure documentshave generally not felt much impact
from electronic media, the exception being checks, which took a hit
from credit and debit cards, as well as electronic bill paying. Its not
hard to imagine the day when checks will no longer be required
especially if a mobile-phone app somehow replaces it. Likewise,
a new system that easily and economically allows individuals to
accept small credit card micropayments via a smartphone or iPad
accessory and app could help relegate the check to obsolescence.
Credit cards may also exist solely as smartphone apps. Thanks
rst to telephone ordering and then e-commerce, the number of
transactions that require an actual physical card is getting smaller
and smaller, so it may end up being less of a hassle for both
credit card companies and consumers to dispense with the card
altogether.
Other secure documents may also evolve into smartphone apps,
although in the case of passports or licenses, real security issues
may preclude that from happening in the next decade.
TABLE 5.11 Security printingpast and future print displacement Security printingpast and future print displacement
(1990-2000)
Potential future
(2010-2020)
Checks M H
Passports/Licences/
Personal ID
N L
Credit cards N L
Printed Packaging
If there is one segment of the printing industry that has little to
fear from electronic media, it is packaging. As long as an item
for sale physically exists, it will need a package of some kind.
That said, as more items are sold over the Internet, obviously the
packaging doesnt need to be as attractive as packaging designed
as a marketing vehicle to attract an in-store consumer. And, in fact,
there has been no small amount of outcry from consumers who are
frustrated by all the antitheft packaging they have to machete their
way through even when they have bought something online, where
you would think there would be minimal chance of theft occurring.
The big places for displacement are media and content delivered
electronically. Software no longer requires boxes and other
packaging, CDs and, eventually, DVDs are going to cede their
position to direct digital downloads.
Still, there will always be proper stores, and as such there will
always be a need for appealing packaging. In fact, as products
become easier to spin off into different niches, there are more SKUs
than ever, which means more demand for individual packaging.
58
Its entirely possible that packaging could integrate electronic (and
printed electronic) display technologies, much in the same way
that some high-prole magazines have experimented with e-paper
covers or even video inserts. This will in no way be a replacement
or displacement of printed packaging but rather an integration of
print and electronic media. We have yet to see something in action,
but the potential is certainly there.
There are also important FDA and EPA requirements for food,
cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals that dictate in large part what they
can and cannot do regarding packaging, and this creates still more
barriers to displacement.
TABLE 5.12 Packaging printingpast and future print displacement Packaging printingpast and future print displacement
Type of packaging Degree of past
(1990-2000)
Potential future
(2010-2020)
Folding cartons L L
Flexible packaging N N
Printed Labels
In the rst half of the 2000s, there were some experiments with
electronic-paper-based labels in retail stores like Macys. After all,
if prices or SKUs or item names change, how easy it is to simply
change the information electronically without needing to reprint
anything. Like other e-paper-based applications (like e-books),
perhaps the idea was ahead of its time, but now this news item
from Switzerland catches the eye: Migros, Switzlerlands leading
retailer, has selected ZBDs e-paper solution as part of a major pilot
project that will see the company move away from price-marked
products in favor of shelf-edge labeling. IBM and other solutions
providers have been pursuing e-paper-based retail labels with a
renewed vigor.
It stands to reason that other types of printed labels, such adhesive
labels for bottles, cans, and other items, will remain printed, for
now at least.
TABLE 5.13 Label printingpast and future print displacement Label printingpast and future print displacement
Type of packag-
ing
Degree of past
(1990-2000)
Potential future
(2010-2020)
Retail labels L M
Adhesive labels N N
Conclusions
The goal of this discussion is not for print providersor even
papermakersto throw up their hands in dismay and call their work
done. While its true that there is a tremendous paper-to-pixel shift
happening, which will only intensify in the coming decade and
beyond, it will forever remain a multichannel, multimedia world,
and print will need to complement and supplement these other
media. It behooves printers and their universe of suppliers and
vendors to help them assist communicatorswho are, after all,
the printers customersintegrate and effectively use all of these
media (and others yet to appear) in tandem. That is where the real
opportunity for the industry lies.
2005 2010
No Twitter (launched 2006) 106 million-plus Twitter users
No Amazon Kindle (launched 2007) 3 million-plus Kindles sold; rst million-e-book-selling Kindle author
(the late Stieg Larsson)
Facebook an obscure student site 500 million-plus active Facebook users
No iPhone (launched 2007) 50 million-plus iPhones sold; 100,000-plus apps developed; 3 billion-
plus apps downloaded
No iPad (launched 2010) 3 million iPads sold in 80 days
FIGURE 1.1 U.S. advertising expenditure increase/decrease, January to June 2010 (%)

Source: Kantar Media
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TABLE 2.2 U.S. advertising expenditure increase/decrease, January to June 2010 (%)
Television media 10.0
Network TV 7.2
Cable TV 8.8
Spot TV 25.1
Spanish language TV 14.6
SyndicationNational -11.7
Magazine media 1.6
Consumer magazines 1.5
B-to-B magazines -4.2
Sunday magazines 13.1
Local magazines -3.5
Spanish language magazines 4.8
Newspaper media -3.0
Local newspapers -4.6
National newspapers 7.1
Spanish language newspapers 2.8
Internet (display ads only) 5.3
Radio media 6.3
Local radio 4.2
National spot radio 16.8
Network radio -0.4
Outdoor 2.8
FSIs 7.6
Total 5.7
Source: Kantar Media
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Note: only includes online, and not social media, mobile,
geolocation, and other emerging nonprint channels.
Source: eMarketer

Source: Forrester Research via Ad Age
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Source: Newspaper Association of America

Note: Growth in 2000 due to Internet ad spending
Source: WhatTheyThink Economics and Research Center
analysis of PIB data
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FIGURE 3.1 Billions of household broadband hours vs. billions of printing dollars, 2000-2009

Source: WhatTheyThinks Economic and Research Center
TABLE 3.2 Consumer technology adoptiondrivers of and barriers to displacement of print
New consumer technologies inevitably nonprint-based New appliances require associated print content
(warranty cards, manuals, etc.)for now
New technologies (tablet PCs, smartphones) displace
the things (PCs) that displaced print to begin with
New print technologies (print-on-demand) can make
print economically viable alternatives to nonprint
(e-books/e-readers)
High-tech gadgets cool New technologies (QR/AR, printable electronics) can
make print competitive in coolness factor
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FIGURE 3.2 Rich media features offered by U.S. multichannel retailers,
February 2010 (% of respondents)

Source: eMarketer
TABLE 3.6 Text to rich mediadrivers of and barriers to displacement of print Text to rich mediadrivers of and barriers to displacement of print
New technologies for disseminating content have
historically been increasingly removed from print,
with greater emphasis on video, audio, animation
and other rich media.
Legacy love of print, non-rich media.
Western consumers insatiable for new technologies. Printable electronics may someday allow rich media to
be added to print.
Successive generations more and more high-tech
and comfortable with new devices and media.
Quick Response (QR) codes and Augmented Reality
(AR) potential for rich print applications.
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FIGURE 3.6 Consumer-driven book sales for e-books, 2008-2009 (actual)
and 2010-2015 (projected) (billion units)

Source: Albert N. Greco Institute for Publishing Research,
via Wall Street Journal
TABLE 4.2 Media enablers and the displacement of print Media enablers and the displacement of print
Enabler Potential for displacement of print? Barrier to displacement of print
Web site Huge; has already happened Minimal
E-mail Huge; has already happened Minimal
Blogs Large; publication/newsletter content now
often blog fodder
Minimal
Podcasting Modest Modest
RSS Minimal Minimal
Social Media Minimal direct displacement; direct mail, PR,
marketing shifting to social media
Minimal
Online video Minimal direct displacement Minimal
Geolocation services Minimal; too new to tell Minimal; too new to tell
FIGURE 3.5 Consumer-driven book sales for printed books, 2008-2009 (actual)
and 2010-2015 (projected) (billion units)

Source: Albert N. Greco Institute for Publishing Research,
via Wall Street Journal
TABLE 4.1 Enablers and the displacement of print Enablers and the displacement of print
Enabler Potential for displacement of print Barrier to displacement of print
Internet Huge; has already happened Minimal
Search Huge; has already happened Minimal
Broadband/WiFi Huge; has already happened; faster connec-
tion speeds will only cause more displace-
ment
Minimal
Cloud Computing Modest Modest
RFID Minimal replacement of tags and labels High; low adoption rate of RFID
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TABLE 4.3 Electronic device enablers and the displacement of print Electronic device enablers and the displacement of print
Enabler Potential for displacement of print? Barrier to displacement of print
E-readers and e-books Huge; e-book readers and e-books have
nally found their elusive market
Legacy love of printed books; format,
DRM, and price confusion
Smartphones Huge; portability of Internet content, apps
revolutionary and disruptive
Wireless carriers; spotty Internet
access
Tablet computers Huge; everything that is disruptive about
smartphones is now available at a better
form factor
Minimal
TABLE 4.4 Display enablers and the displacement of print Display enablers and the displacement of print
Enabler Potential for Displacement of Print? Barrier to Displacement of Print
Flexible displays Huge, at least in the case of the e-paper
already used in current e-readers; if proto-
type displays hit the market, even greater
displacement is possible
Same barriers as e-books and e-read-
ers; in the case of other displays, high
manufacturing costs, few successful
commercialisations
3D displays Negligible Lack of consumer interest, high cost,
lack of 3D content

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65
TABLE 2.2 U.S. advertising expenditure increase/decrease, January to June 2010 (%)
TABLE 2.3 Social-media marketing spending, U.S. vs. non-U.S., 2009-2011 ($ billion)
TABLE 2.4 Compound annual growth rate for selected book categories, 2002-2009 (%)
TABLE 3.2 Consumer technology adoptiondrivers of and barriers to displacement of print
TABLE 3.3 Magazine publishing trendsdrivers of and barriers to displacement of print
TABLE 3.4 Newspaper publishing trendsdrivers of and barriers to displacement of print
TABLE 3.5 Catalog publishing trendsdrivers of and barriers to displacement of print
TABLE 3.6 Text to rich mediadrivers of and barriers to displacement of print
TABLE 3.7 Book and e-book pricing variation ($)
TABLE 3.8 E-book trendsdrivers of and barriers to displacement of print
TABLE 4.1 Enablers and the displacement of print
TABLE 4.2 Media enablers and the displacement of print
TABLE 4.3 Electronic device enablers and the displacement of print
TABLE 4.4 Display enablers and the displacement of print
TABLE 4.5 Annual printing shipment value, 2010 and 2015 (US$ million)
TABLE 4.6 Composition of sales for a typical printer, 2010 and 2015 (%)
TABLE 5.1 Bookspast and future print displacement
TABLE 5.2 Catalogspast and future print displacement
TABLE 5.3 Directoriespast and future print displacement
TABLE 5.4 Magazinespast and future print displacement
TABLE 5.5 Newspaperspast and future print displacement
TABLE 5.6 Financial and legal documentspast and future print displacement
TABLE 5.7 Manuals and technical documentspast and future print displacement
TABLE 5.8 Advertising materialspast and future print displacement
TABLE 5.9 General commercial printingpast and future print displacement
TABLE 5.10 Ofce printingpast and future print displacement
TABLE 5.11 Security printingpast and future print displacement
TABLE 5.12 Packaging printingpast and future print displacement
TABLE 5.13 Label printingpast and future print displacement
FIGURE 2.1 U.S. advertising expenditure increase/decrease, January to June 2010 (%)
FIGURE 3.1 Billions of household broadband hours vs. billions of printing dollars, 2000-2009
FIGURE 3.2 Rich media features offered by U.S. multichannel retailers, February 2010
(% of respondents)
FIGURE 3.5 Consumer-driven book sales for printed books, 2008-2009 (actual) and 2010-2015
(projected) (billion units)
FIGURE 3.6 Consumer-driven book sales for e-books, 2008-2009 (actual) and 2010-2015
(projected) (billion units)

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