Bill Lamparter

When it comes to forecasting the current sheetfed and web offset markets, the biggest threat isn’t just digital technology, it’s the state of the economy. There are some pretty exciting developments going on in the lithographic printing market this year, but that’s the problem. It’s 2009.

TWO PREDICTIONS for the 2009 calendar year: Barack Obama will be sworn in this month as the 44th president of the United States, and printers will endure an even tougher year than they did in 2008. Sorry...with the economy being what it is, the editors at Printing Impressions can’t even afford to go out on a limb. And, when it comes to forecasting the fortunes of printers for the final year of the millennium’s first decade, it hardly takes Nostradamus to tell us that economic pressures will cast a heavy burden on printers in 2009.

 

HAVING RECENTLY returned from Graph Expo, I felt it was important to highlight a few things that came out of the show that might not have been covered elsewhere. First, as might be expected in the current economic situation, it did appear that attendance was a bit lower than the show company and exhibitors had hoped. Some booths were very busy; others less so.

ANY TALK concerning the efforts to improve postpress efficiency invariably degrades into a philosophical discussion over what, exactly, entails binding, finishing and friends. Ah yes, there is more than meets the eye, especially when mailing, fulfillment, kitting and other sometimes labor-intensive duties are added to the mix. After all, magazines are more apt to get caught up in discussions about definitions. But a workflow is a workflow, and it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Whatever stands between receiving the order and the truck pulling away from the dock impacts the workflow. While hardware and software manufacturers have yet to devise a tonic that

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