Discussion

By Bob O'Shea on Jul 24, 2013

I looked at this video this morning which then reminded me of the book that Frank got his RIT students to produce on the future of print as they might envisage it in 2022. Fine. This book is just about a year old and there are some missing bits like the opportunities being presented by today's video. The demise of postal services might not be as rapid as foreseen only a year ago as the sheer volume of delivery traffic via Amazon, Ebay and a whole host of lesser (volume) retailers starts to bite. In the UK my own neighbourhood sees any number of delivery vehicles, including our own Royal Mail, delivering once or twice a day. A couple of years ago seeing our little red van once a week was a novelty (I exaggerate for effect). All of this traffic has a common thread - all of it contains significant print and may yet be a means to save big parts of the snail mail market by making it affordable (for the deliverers) to deliver. But back to the video. The opportunity for self publishing of small booklets, for example, into a neighbourhood inexpensively is likely to grow as the technology gets less expensive and the quality and options increase. We ain't seen the last of print just yet.