Vague musings, name-dropping, streams of consciousness, and occasional flashes of brilliance...from Johnson’s World.

“Paper shows that analog technology can excel at specific tasks and uses on a very practical level, especially when compared to digital technology. While paper use may have shrunk in certain areas since the introduction of digital communications, in other uses and purposes, paper’s emotional, functional and economic value has increased. Paper may be used less, but where it is growing, paper is worth more.” —David Sax, Revenge of Analog

“Storytelling comes from many voices, and print is the most experienced voice – a tried and true technology that can’t be ignored.” —American Crew’s David Reaccuglia, quoted in Domtar’s Paper Matters magazine

Guildhall, a restaurant at which I’ve eaten once or twice (before they began requiring a deposit with dinner reservations) sent me an email in February with this subject line:

“Guildhall’s got your Super Bowl & Valentine’s Day covered ”

That was it. There was nothing in the body of the email except the Constant Contact boilerplate that normally appears at the bottom. A stupid mistake, but one that occurs often with email for the simple reason that email is so easy to use. Yes, it is too user friendly. The owner’s teenage son or daughter can whip up a “marketing campaign” using Constant Contact or a similar service in a matter of minutes. Press send, and voila! The hard cost is practically nothing.

If the offer was a printed mailer or postcard, the printer would have alerted the restaurant that, “Hey, your page layout file is empty.”

Sometimes more touchpoints are a good thing.

“Every form of theatre has something in common with a visit to the doctor. On the way out, one should always feel better than on the way in.” —Lord Peter Brook, famous director who passed away last month.

Does not this hold true for every form of art, for every medium? Is it not the responsibility of the printer to see that the world is a better place for the words and pictures that they produce and disseminate?

A manufacturer whose name is synonymous with copying posted this on LinkedIn:

“An average office worker uses 10,000 sheets of paper per year. We can help reduce that. Our capture and content services takes paper and digital information and lets you edit it in the cloud. Find out more at www…..”

I’ll just leave that tidbit right here without comment, but see below.

“With an average of 13 pages printed per person, per month, and over 12 million office-based workers, it is estimated that over 1.5 billion personal documents are being printed by staff at work each year.

Almost one in five Brits said they use work printers to print personal documents, while 13% said they print these documents multiple times a week. Just 6% of those surveyed said they print personal documents at work less than once a year.” —PrintMonthly magazine

If we extrapolate PrintMonthly’s math out to the United States, that’s 17 billion (yes, billion with a “B”) personal pages being printed at work by Americans.

That’s a massive hidden cost that business is absorbing, and a huge inconvenience for consumers. It is also a tremendous quantity of print volume that doesn’t make it into Commerce Department statistics.

Don’t let anyone tell you that end users prefer digital formats.