The Future of Big Printing: Toward Personalized Customized Services

The reason the printing industry is called big printing lies partly in a certain pride of mine as a practitioner in the printing industry, and even more in the fact that the printing industry has far too many connections with our daily life. If you look closely, everything around us is inseparable from this "big printing"; perhaps "inextricably linked" is the right phrase to use here.

However, when my colleagues and I happened to talk about e-books and the conversation got going, I suddenly felt a twinge of worry about the future of the printing industry: will we still need printing one day? We know that e-readers, as a new content medium, have many "fatal" advantages over traditional bound-book carriers. First, they are very environmentally friendly and cause no damage whatsoever to forest resources; second, they can store massive amounts of information and are also very convenient to carry; at the same time, their reading cost is lower than that of traditional books. Everything indicates that e-readers replacing traditional books is only natural.

On the other hand, with the emergence of new media such as the Internet, newspaper printing has long since become precarious. The Internet, with its massive, simultaneous and free provision of information, has deprived newspapers of their reason to exist, and this has already been gradually turning into reality in the United States across the ocean. From the beginning of this year until now, many century-old traditional newspapers have either closed down or helplessly moved themselves to online platforms, abandoning printed newspapers.

Many people in the newspaper industry keep sighing helplessly: where is the future of the newspaper business? And newspaper printing and book printing, which will continue to be buffeted by new content carriers in the future, also leave every printing practitioner no choice but to ask themselves: if book printing and newspaper printing are lost, where is the future of the entire big printing industry?

The future is always in our own hands! The emergence of new technologies has dealt a huge blow to the entire printing industry, and from the perspective of sustainable resource utilization, the printing industry should give up some traditional market areas; this is an inevitable trend in the future development of every industry, and we should feel no regret about it whatsoever. On the contrary, the emergence of some new technologies from within the printing industry is imperceptibly opening up a brand-new market for us. It is just like how, in the last 30 years of the previous century, the popularization of automobiles inadvertently presented the broadcasting industry with a huge emerging market.

With the emergence and continuous improvement of new technologies and new printing management approaches such as CTP, digital printing and I-COM, they seem to be painting a brand-new printing future for us: printing or copying jobs that were originally complex and required coordinated cooperation among multiple trades and a long preparation time are becoming simple and fast, and in the near future we individuals will be able to order personalized printing services directly from printing plants and modify them at any time. Printing plants will receive more and more large volumes of printing demand from individuals, and in the future, through customized printing, personal individuality will be fully displayed; such a market will be full of charm and enormous.

It cannot be denied that the technological revolution is changing our lives. Perhaps one day we will no longer need newspapers or books, but we as individuals will always need colorful personalized expression; we will like and rely on printing even more, and with such enormous demand, printing will exist forever.

——This article is reprinted from China Packaging Network (pack.cn), original link: http://news.pack.cn/show-362318.html