The printing industry is continually being challenged by information delivery in non-printed formats. The Internet has generated a real alternative to print for a variety of products and has in certain cases totally eliminated print as a means of production for some of these. These are predominantly in the reference publications and technical documentation areas for products like encyclopaedias, parts catalogues, operating manuals, directories and many other items. Despite many attempts to introduce digital reading products, printed products like newspapers, books and magazines have not been significantly been impacted. Of course publishers particularly of newspapers make the editorial and advertising information from their publications available on the Internet. Many magazines also provide some material on the Internet, but up to now few have placed the entire content of publications online. E-book editions have been available for downloading to PCs and e-readers at a price.

Initially when publishers, and in particular newspaper publishers, put their copy on the Internet they simply put a facsimile of the newspaper on the web. They also used the medium as a means of putting the print edition on the web after it had been published in print. Newspapers soon learnt that in an era of instant information that the Internet edition had to compete with the print edition by publishing information as soon as it became available. Newspaper publishers also learnt that advertising on the Internet was very different than advertising in print and it was not possible to sell static run of the press type advertisements on a page. Classified advertisements also had to be treated differently if they were to be relevant and competitive. In the editorial area newspapers soon realised after starting Internet publishing that content had to be free and readers would not pay to read the content apart from a very few cases where such data had real value.

The magazine market was somewhat different and magazine publishers took time to work out how to work with the Internet. Some magazines, particularly B2B ones, realised the potential of putting recruitment advertising on the Internet, and some put up e-zines with some limited content in electronic format. In most cases this was taking the PDF print file and repurposing it for the Internet but without putting specialised reading tools with it.