In his fifth blog in the monthly series drawn from the recently released PRIMIR study, "Impact of Electronic Technologies on Print," Marco Boer, Vice President, MarcoBoer I.T. Strategies, looks at how-while content creators and consumers may live in a fully connected digital world, and though many areas of the print industry have adapted to working with digital-the analog print industry has managed to create 'islands of digital automation' rather than establishing a unified end-to-end digital process.

Boer hypothesizes that the creative process is interrupted and slowed by manual intervention as digitally created data and graphics are converted to plates and then to substrates, often subject to varying levels of expertise and artisanal skill of the individual operator. As content creation explodes, and pressures increase to compress the time available to distribute this content, much of the new content generation will automatically gravitate towards electronic display output.

Read the full blog to find out why Boer suggests that barriers preventing rapid dis-semination of content will need to be removed, why print won't disappear anytime soon, and how electronic technologies while causing erosion of low-value offset print volumes are also opening up new opportunities for high-value digitally printed output. Visit www.npes.org/blog and join the conversation!