If you have been tuning in to WhatTheyThink’s monthly economics webinars, hosted by Dr. Joe Webb and myself, you have heard us road test material for our forthcoming book The Third Wave, which is slated to be published at Print 17 in September. Essentially, the theme of the book is that there is a “third wave” of technology coming that threatens to further disrupt the market demand for print.

So if the Third Wave is soon to be upon us, what were the first two?

If you recall, the First Wave crested in 1998, which was the point at which the consumer Internet took hold. Print’s role had become in large part the way to drive traffic to everyone’s brand-new websites, but pretty soon Google emerged and better search capabilities put an end to that. We had remarked at the time that 1998–1999 would be seen as the end of the “good old days” of mainstream US commercial printing, and it was.