More Print Than Not

These topics are brought up now, because it is often assumed that non-print activities comprise more of the print shipments dollar than ever. This is now part of the industry’s common wisdom. It is clearly not true to anyone who can remember all of the time and monies clients would have to spend just to enter the print process at all. All of the camera work, paste-ups, mechanicals, proofs, scans, more proofs were not billings for ink-on-paper, even though that was usually the job of printers. Because desktop publishing has extracted the equivalent tasks from the printing industry and put them in the hands of designers and non-printers, it is actually more likely that ink-on-paper actually comprises a greater part of the value of commercial print shipments than ever before. None of the “value-added” services that are frequently discussed in the business come close to the costs of design, production, and other prepress that were naturally embedded in all print billings of the time.