Hi, this is Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com. Google has this really neat new thing called the Ngram Viewer, N for Nancy, g-r-a-m, Ngram Viewer. Now if you recall Google went around the world and scanned books in libraries virtually everywhere. They got into trouble with some author’s association, but the important thing is that most of the books that they scanned were in the public domain, books from hundreds of years ago up through perhaps the last hundred years or so and because when they scanned them they did optical character recognition they also had a text file, so they could actually then search through all those text files for terms, so the Ngram Viewer is a way of searching for the terms that exist in all those books that were scanned, in millions and millions of books going back 200, 300 years or so.

So for instance, I used it the other day and I put in “digital printing”, “digital printing” and what it says is that the term was not used until the late 1960s, early 1970s and then the growth in the use of that term is phenomenal, so therefore, from 1970 until now the term “digital printing” is a very common term in all of those publication, but wait. I did the same thing for “inkjet”. I took the term “inkjet” and tracked it and what you discover is you only find in the late 1980s that you see any traction on “inkjet”. By the way, if you get this little fall off over here because again current books, there aren’t a lot of current books that they’ve scanned in because they would be still under copyright.

So then I said let’s try an older one. Let’s try “offset lithography”, so what you discover with “offset lithography” is from the 1920s to the 1930s up through and it reaches its peak by the way in 1970. That is when the term “offset lithography” was most used and then it starts to decline there. There is a little blip here in 1980 or so and then it declines, although again it’s a dominate process, but in terms of people writing about it well you start to see a fall off in the books that do that.

Again there is a time and a period when something comes into existence and everyone talks about it. Everyone write about it. Everyone opines about it. So offset lithography has had that period. Now we take it for granted now. Will there be a revival of offset lithography? I think there will. I think there are things coming that will revive offset lithography and allow it to continue. I don’t think it will grow, but it will not decline as fast as people say.

The same with inkjet, you’re going to see—if you were to track—you went forward 30 years you would see that the term inkjet is only now getting the traction it should get. That growth during the last 20 years was mostly talking about how it was developing. Now we’re talking about how to use it and of course the all encompassing term digital printing began with the first laser printers in 1976 or so and then the first wave of machines, desktop machines in 1980 and then of course the color machines in 1993 and that’s why you see this kind of a curve. Now digital printing is an all encompassing term. It’s like an umbrella. It covers inkjet. It covers toner. It covers face change. It covers just about anything you can imagine.

So search for Ngram Viewer and put it—and by the way, you can put two different terms in at the same time and compare how those two terms relate in terms of the publications over the last hundreds of years. It’s a fascinating service that most people don’t know about and for people like me who do research and confused students with all these fun facts this is an interesting way to get them. In any case, that’s my opinion.

It may concern you that you’re eating pieces of wood pulp, but that’s just the way life is nowadays.