This Week with Frank Romano

[Music Introduction]

Frank Romano:  Hi, this is Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com.  Well, welcome back to a new episode.  I'm here at RIT to pick up all the stuff that I shipped back to myself from my recent trip.  And when I came home, there were a whole batch of news articles that I thought were of interest.  Some things we probably knew were going to happen. 

This one I liked very much.  It says, "Companies brace for end of cheap made in China era."

[Music and Photo with Caption:  I outlive all eras.]

But we knew that their standard of living would go up.  People would want, all the workers would want the same kinds of benefits that workers in other countries did.  This happened in Japan after World War II, it happened in South Korea, it happens almost anywhere.  So the cheap labor rates of China now start to change.  It says here, "Factory workers demanding better wages and working conditions are hastening the eventual end of an era of cheap costs that help to make southern coastal China the world's factory floor."  I love the fact that Wham-O, who created the hula-hoop, is bringing half of its Frisbee production back to the United States.

But here's the most interesting one, quoted in the article, for publishers, it says, "Printing a 9 x 9, 334-page hardcover book in China costs about 45 cents, with 3 cents for shipping," I think that sounds low, but I could be wrong, "That same book costs 68 cents to make in the United States.  If costs go up by half, it's about the same price then in the US and you don't have 30 days on the water in shipping charges."  So it's entirely possible we'll start to see printing and manufacturing of other kinds come back, and that's the best thing that could happen.  We've got to get back to making things.

[Music and Photo with Caption:  Preferably printed things.]

Someone did a study, but a very informal study, they only tested 24 people, and they gave them a PC, a Kindle 2, and an iPad, and they compared reading a book on the electronic devices to reading a book on paper.  And they used a short story by Ernest Hemingway—and by the way, you can't get simpler than an Ernest Hemingway piece, because it's all simple sentences, virtually no semicolons, no em-dashes, it is basic writing.  And so that short story was used.  So they read the e-book version and the paper version, and what they discovered was, this test, that reading the e-book version was 10% slower than those who read a printed version.  However, the iPad and the Kindle rated very high in terms of satisfaction, people were very happy using it, as happy as using paper.  However, they didn't like he PC and it was way down there.  Some said reading a PC felt like being at work.  So the satisfaction level was there, which means that people will probably read e-books.  And over time, they'll be bi-textual, they'll do both.

[Music and Photo with Caption:  Let's just leave that one alone, shall we?]

New Jersey no longer sends you, if you're an insurance agent, no longer sends you a printed license, they send you an electronic file.  I don't know if you then print that out or you just show it to people.

The best thing that I saw when I came back, and this is fantastic.  This is a, from PGAMA.  PGAMA stands for Printing and Graphics Association Mid Atlantic, it's the PIA affiliate in Maryland and DC, down in that area.  They did an entire campaign, first they did a book called Print Grows Trees.  The whole premise is, that if you didn't have print, there's no incentive to grow a tree and that's why print creates more forest and more trees than if you didn't have print.  So, and it wasn't just a book—and by the way, well done, beautifully written, short, to the point, beautifully designed, ah, it smells of print.

[Music and Photo with Caption:  Try smelling an iPad, see where that gets ya.]

They did a t-shirt, they did posters.  I love this poster, I'm going to have this framed, I'm going to hang this in my house, an embossed poster – "Print Grows Trees."  They did another version of it well, on coated stock.  What was fantastic about this campaign, and this is what happens when we all work together.  The printers that belong to PGAMA, and the suppliers, they're noted on each piece where they contributed, so you had Harris Lithographics, xpedx, the company that did the embossing, Raff Embossing & Foilcraft, the company that printed the book, Goetz, I'm sorry, G-O-E-T-Z, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly.  And in there it lists all the other people involved.  So it was printing companies who were members, it was suppliers, it was a village.  And this is what happens when we all come together, we can make a difference.  We can get print back into people's minds and let them understand, environmentally, print is good.  And by the way, for marketing and communication, print is fantastic.

Thank you very much, take care. 

[Music] 

[Caption:  Next time…] 

Writing an essay, I'm good at essays, I can write something short.  Writing a book is hard, except that I figured it out.

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