In the US, PRIMIR (Printing Industry Market Information and Research Organization) is about to release a research study on the impact of digital printing that was prepared for them by IT Strategies. This study looks at the period 2009 – 2014, and projects a drop in the page volume of analog printing over this period of 0.3% and a growth of digital printing by 15.9%. While this appears to show a major increase in digital printing if one puts these figures in context it still shows that analog printing is 97% of all print volume and digital is 3%. These numbers are not by value but by number of sheets printed. IT Strategies indicated that a finding of the study is that digital pages have a much higher value than analog pages so if the study were to look at the value of both analog and digital printing, then the digital value would be much higher than 3%. In terms of pages all figures are based upon A4 (Letter) size single sided pages (and all analog printing volumes are converted to be equivalent to this format).

One of the key aspects of the PRIMIR study is to assess when the “tipping point” of analog to digital printing will take place. The assessment of the study is that it will take decades for this to happen. To make such an assessment is very difficult, if not impossible as there are too many unknown variables to take into account. I also believe that one cannot look at a study that just works on the basis of pages printed, and one must also look at the value of printing and the run lengths carried out, plus the changes happening in the market such as the impact of e-readers on reducing the length of print runs for books.

I have recently had the opportunity to spend time with Heidelberg looking at their plans to re-enter the digital printing market early this year, and as part of this I was privileged to see some of Heidelberg’s market figures. Heidelberg generates their figures from taking input from a variety of sources, including PRIMIR, but also other research companies in the printing and paper industries. These figures looking at the overall print market are based upon the value of print rather than the number of pages. In this they take a base year of 2009 as the base year for real representation of values.. This shows the overall worldwide value of print in the print media industry in that year to be €413 billion. The shown figures include for the 2009 value of print a breakdown by commercial/packaging/publishing with commercial leading at 42%, as well as a split by printing process (sheet fed, web, etc) with sheet-fed leading at almost 38% and Digital (production) slightly above 6%.