Hi there, this is Frank Romano. Well a number of things that were in the news that I found of interest. IRS, no more tax forms in the mailbox. They’re now going to send them out either electronically or you will download them electronically or you will deal with your tax preparer electronically. That was one of the biggest contracts that was lent out by the Federal Government for printing and now it will be gone. So what will we pick up at the post office? Probably not a CD-ROM because they’re not going to make CD-ROMs anymore. Sony just closed down one of the last plants in the United States, well not the last plant, there’s one more I guess left.

This was another one I found. Can the checkbook make a comeback? And they have a little chart showing the decline in the number of checks that we make out. Well we’ve already known that electronic banking is taking its toll on checks but you can see that there is certain printed products that are going to disappear over time. I think I had a discussion about phonebook pages at one point in time.

This one was rather interesting. It has to do with books but not the way we think about them. People are buying up… artists are buying up books and they’re putting new covers on them and using it as a decorative item in your home. So they’ll build a bookcase for you and they’ll put these books in there and then multiple books will have covers on them that will form an image on the back of them. The image they have here is a guy with some books and there’s a picture of an elephant that is formed by the multiple books. One guy takes the books and he takes them apart and he makes sculptures of trees. So there are people who destroy trees to make books and there are people who destroy books to make trees. So I thought that was interesting.

There’s a play, there’s a play called “Futura.” It’s based on the typeface but it has nothing to do with the typeface. Again, there was a play about Guttenberg a few years ago that I went to see. It was absolutely terrible but I had to go see it because it said Guttenberg. Well this one I have to see; it says Futura. I wonder if now we’ll see a whole line of shows about typefaces. You know, Times New Roman. I can go work for the New York Times and then I would be the Times New Romano. Oh, that might work.

In any case there’s lots of stuff happening out there. It’s an interesting marketplace as we move into this digital era. Certain printed products disappear and it just changes the nature of who we are and what we do. And we’ll try and comment on that as we go along. And on this site by the way, you’ll find some other videos I think are of interest, things that I’ve done in the past; other little items that are pertinent I think in one area and perhaps amusing in other areas.

So in any case, that’s all my opinion.