Cary Sherburne:  Hi.  I’m Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor with IThink.com, and I’m here with Bob Tapella, my old friend.  You’re not old, but old friend and a former U.S. Public Printer.  How are you. 

Bob Tapella:  I’m terrific, Cary. 

Cary Sherburne:  You sound so happy.  You sound so much happier than when you were a public printer.

Bob Tapella:  I’m stress-free.

Cary Sherburne:  Hey, there you go.

Bob Tapella:  It’s actually really nice.  My tour ended at the end of December and I’ve taken some time off.  And I’ve decided this year I’m just going to spend having fun looking at the industry and trying to decide what I do next, and if the right opportunity comes around I’m going to jump at it; but if not, I’m in no great rush.

Cary Sherburne:  That is terrific.  You know, we’re here in Washington, DC at the On Demand Show and I was really happy to see that the cherry blossoms are looking very beautiful.  But what do you think of the show?

Bob Tapella:  Well, I think from a pure show perspective it’s a disappointment.  From an industry perspective I think it’s pretty exciting and interesting.  So you don’t have either Kodak or Xerox here.  HP doesn’t have any production equipment.  And you sort of—the question why?  Well, if you think back to almost two decades ago when Charlie Pesco started this show and Info Trends, this was the radical show.  These were the guys that weren’t allowed in the mainstream print shows.  Well today, if you went to Graph Expo in the fall, it was Xerox, it was Kodak, it was Digital, it was everywhere.

Cary Sherburne:  HP right up front where Heidelberg used to be.

Bob Tapella:  You better believe it.  Absolutely.  And for the industry I think that is a tremendous transformation because if you’re a printer today you have to be digital if you want to be successful.  And these radicals are now mainstream.  So I think from the industry perspective it’s terrific.  From a show perspective it’s obviously, I’m sure a disappointment.  But I think it served its purpose over the years.

Cary Sherburne:  But do you think it still has a purpose?

Bob Tapella:  You know, I’d have to ask the—you’d have to ask the individual vendors who are participating whether they’re getting their bang for their buck.  I know in Xerox’s case there are three blocks around.  They have this tremendous knowledge center and did a nice customer event.  With the other vendors it looks like Kodak didn’t see a value this year.  HP didn’t see a value in sending the equipment this year. 

Cary Sherburne:  And by the way, the vendors tell me that this is the most expensive show in our industry.

Bob Tapella:  Really?

Cary Sherburne:  Just for exhibit space, purchasing exhibit space.  And next year they’re moving it to Javits so that’s going to add another level of cost because that’s not a cheap environment for a lot of reasons.  So the main reason I’m here is because they introduced Publishing Xchange and that—David Zwang put that together—and it was sort of like a modern day C-bolt.  I mean it was really, really a good, a good conference.  I heard hugely positive feedback about—well, My Track of course, but, you know, the rest of it.

Bob Tapella:  Well speaking of Javits, in 2003 I delivered the Keynote Address and there were thousands of people in the audience.  I don’t think there were even thousands of people—if you took out all the vendor staff, I don’t think there were even a thousand people as just general attendees.

Cary Sherburne:  Well, they said, somewhere I heard that there were like 15,000 pre-registered but there’s no skin in the game.  You can register for free and so there’s no commitment to really follow through on that.

Bob Tapella:  So I think like everything in this industry you have to re-evaluate whether it makes sense or not.

Cary Sherburne:  Yeah.  And they seem to have some strategy that is supposed to migrate this more towards the Publishing Xchange kind of content.

Bob Tapella:  I’m very much looking forward—it’ll be interesting to see what the next Graph Expo looks like, but more importantly, what Drupa is going to look like.  And will there be a large digital interface at Drupa?  Will what is happening here in America take place at Drupa?  And that to me is exciting.  I think it’s a great time to be in the industry.  I think we’re now finally mainstream with those digital ideas.  You know, one of the jokes when I first came to the Government Printing Office is I kept saying it’s a digital world, and they were laughing at me.  And I think today, if you look at it eight years later, it is in fact a digital world.

Cary Sherburne:  I think that even though 2008 was the inkjet Drupa, we’re going to see some very, very interesting inkjet announcements at Drupa, and I don’t think they’ll be at Graph Expo because people are waiting for Drupa.

Bob Tapella:  Correct.  I think the one thing that we’ll probably see at Graph Expo is the Xeroxing Jet that they just came out…

Cary Sherburne:  Yeah, they showed that at Hunkler.

Bob Tapella:  They showed that at Hunkler and the first is going to be here in Chicago which I’m really looking forward to because I think it proves to be interesting.  They’ve got a slightly different take on it than some of the other manufacturers.  And one of the things that I am looking at and actually was having discussions yesterday with our IT, as well as earlier with Cal Polley in January, about how we can bring students to Drupa to experience the big show and the changes that are taking place so they understand the role that they are playing in this larger communications industry.

Cary Sherburne:  It’s great to see you; it’s great to see you looking so relaxed and we wish you well in whatever your next endeavors entail.

Bob Tapella:  Great.  Thank you, Cary.

Cary Sherburne:  Thank you.