I recently got a question from a student, studying Print Management at Dublin Institute of Technology in Ireland. She is writing a paper on the ability of the print industry to compete with ecommerce. Can the improved printing technologies which are available today, compete effectively to maintain market share?
I replied that the question is off base. It's easy to imagine that a school with "technology" in its name would structure its courses in terms of competing technologies. But in the real world, companies that expect to survive don't blindly support one technology instead of another. Rather they evolve and adapt, using whatever mix of technologies make sense to profitably serve their customers.
The question of print industry vs. ecommerce feels is as unnatural as the question of brick-and-mortar businesses vs. ecommerce. Companies that expect to survive and thrive should operate with a mixture of techniques -- changing what they do and how they do it to take advantage of new opportunities, while capitalizing on existing assets. I'm reminded of the Circuit City ads on TV promoting the idea of buying goods online and then picking them up quickly at a physical store. In other cases, the customer may want to shop online -- using search capabilities to learn about many possible products, as in the case of book shopping; or using decision support tools to consider a multitude of complex options, as in the case of cars or top-of-the-line entertainment systems; and then do the actual buying face-to-face. In those cases, retailers face the challenge of how to hook online shoppers into buying from their stores, instead of going somewhere else that offers the same merchandise. That's not much different from the challenge that computer stores faced in the early 1980s, when customers would first go to the stores that had knowledgeable retail personnel. They'd ask all their questions, decide what they wanted to buy, and then go to a store that had no help but lower prices.
But I'm digressing...
Returning to the question from the student in Ireland, I don't see any conflict between the printing industry and ecommerce. The question mixes apples and oranges. The printing industry is a set of companies that in the past depended on paper printing, but that is rapidly evolving in electronic directions. Ecommerce is a sales channel, an alternative way of selling products and services, which most printing companies already use and should use far more in the future.
Printing companies that are savvy should use ecommerce to market their services: 1) traditional printing 2) print on demand and 3) electronic duplication and delivery.
Traditional printing and print on demand today typically require that you submit manuscripts in electronic form. Print on demand is even more demanding, requiring Acrobat (pdf) format, with the person doing the submission (whether a publisher or an author) taking care of all the formatting.
There's a natural evolution toward more and more of the process being digital/electronic, until the final product is also electronic.
The changing role of printers in some ways resembles the changing role
of video stores, which now rent and sell analog tapes, and increasingly
also rent and sell DVDs. At the same time, cable TV companies and some
Web sites make the same movies available on a pay-per-view basis. The stores
could and should create DVDs on demand (from online files) rather than
stocking
inventory. In general, they should look for new ways to add value and
serve their customers, taking full advantage of technological advances,
instead of fighting them.
Likewise, printers should be looking for new ways to serve publishers, authors, and readers. Rather than presuming that their business is putting ink on paper, they should look more closely at what their customers want and how to better meet those needs.
My
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