Hi.  This is Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com—Hopscotching the World for News.  Scientists or archeologists have discovered a 100,000-year-old art studio somewhere near South Africa.  They found various utensils, holding containers, and mixing tools for making colors of different kinds.  Does this mean there were graphic designers back in the Stone Age?  And, by the way, did they ask for the red to be redder?  Did they ask you to punch up logo in some way?

This one was very interesting.  It says “out of stock, still in luck, print-on-demand expands.”  There’s a big movement out there right now that talks about the bookless bookshelf, the bookless bookstore, because some bookstores are installing the Espresso Book Machine which Xerox markets; which means you can have books on-demand, although I still like to kind of finger the book if I can.

Most of us buy our books online nowadays.  It’s kind of sad that Borders closed down.  So there are fewer bookstores in America and they can’t hold all the books that people want to buy, so on-demand makes a lot of sense.  I envision that these machines eventually could be used for more than books, perhaps magazines, perhaps articles in magazines, or combinations of articles in magazines.  So it’s entirely possible that bookstores will become sort of ATMs for printing out books, if you will.

The Seaport Museum is back.  Bowne & Company which was acquired by RR Donnelley.  Bowne was the oldest printing company in the United States.  They have a little print shop, an antique print shop in the Seaport District of New York City, of Lower Manhattan.  It was closed down for almost a year.  Now they’re opening it again.  It’s a very nice place.  Please, if you get a chance and you’re in New York City, go and visit it.

It says SmartPhone users are starting to do more with QR Codes.  It says that 14 million people, which is 6.2 percent of the total US mobile audience, are using QR Codes.  Yes, they’re sort of catching on in a lot of ways and I see some potential for it, although I have my doubts.  However, I think they would do more with QR Codes if they didn’t call them QR Codes.  Call them mobile codes, call them customer codes, call them computer codes.

QR Codes—I don’t know.  This bothers me.  Printing and packaging companies are at war with each other.  As printers are now installing offset presses, they can handle folding cartons.  As you know, Komori, Heidelberg, Manroland, KBA, and others have offset presses that can handle not only traditional document substrates, but also heavier weights used for packaging.  And now there’s sort of a war for personnel.  Where do I find the people that can help a printer who has not been in packaging get into packaging?  So they’re raiding people from the packaging companies.  The packaging companies at this stage have not gotten into document work so that hasn’t gone the other way at this stage.

This is a very sad one—longtime Peoria printer closing up shop.  It talks about a printer in Peoria that’s been in business since 1880.  It talks about how their run lengths changed.  Some of their customers went offshore for the work that they did.  It’s just a very sad story and very typical of the kind of thing I see on a regular basis nowadays.  Now normally—this company just says they’re closing up—but the odds are that the owner and some of the staff are probably going over to some other printing company because that’s normally what happens.  It’s sort of a merger-acquisition as companies come together and the former owner becomes a broker or a sales agent or a salesperson for another printing company.  So the odds are that some of the people will do relatively well, but we lose another printing company in the United States.

And, by the way, that’s not—in Western Europe similar kinds of things are happening.  Where the growth is in printing right now is in Brazil and Eastern Europe and Russia and Asia.  But eventually their standard of living will go up.  Costs will go up.  And then I think it’s interesting that perhaps some printing will start to come back to the United States.  So maybe there’s a little bright spot in all of this.

In any case, that’s Hopscotching the World for News, and that’s my opinion.