Consumables-Paper - Offset

This PaperSpecsGallery.com entry is a blue chip of an idea for any portfolio. Linking the concept of the stock certificate to a collectible piece of art (both things that increase in value in happy times) is money in the bank.

We’ve recently been talking about coated paper prices as if there’s a single entity called coated paper. Of course, it’s not that simple. There are a lot of different coated papers and, too, coated papers compete with uncoated papers—not to mention electronic forms of communication.

Universities should be prime real estate for the expanding e-book market, but for the most part students are clinging to the traditional book form. Yet despite an increasing number of consumers hopping on the bandwagon—with Amazon selling more e-books than printed books and the e-book market at the brink of breaking $1 billion in revenue—students don’t seem to be convinced.

Serious students approach reading effectively as a vandal. With the bare minimum of a pencil in hand (some even carry an armory of color-coded highlighters, Post-it pads and paper clips), they deface the page in conversation with the text, underlining, highlighting

This year during Paper Week in Chicago, I escaped from the meetings for a field trip. I was invited to visit the FutureMark paper mill, which was unlike many others I’ve visited. This one is in an urban forest, and makes high-quality recycled paper.

Sometimes, printers have to switch suppliers. What should you do? Ask the merchants to bring in samples? Look at printed samples? Look at unprinted samples? Buy what’s cheapest? Buy a truckload of four different papers and see how they perform and then decide?

In the brave new world of media—or the brave world of new media—turnabout is most definitely fair play. Google, for instance, advertises itself in newspapers and trade publications. And now a leading paper company is promoting one of its products with a series of online video clips.

The company is Sappi, and the product is Flo, Sappi’s value-priced, or economy, line of paper. To gain a following for Flo among a target audience of printers and press operators, Sappi is sponsoring humorous webisodes under the title “Off Register.”

The campaign for Flo is not forgoing print entirely

Are paper markups the best way to go? A small survey that I launched revealed that printers are confused about what to charge when customers supply paper: 71 percent agreed with the statement, “paper markups are critical to our profitability” but 50 percent agreed that “when customers supply paper, we don't lose much because we still include a cost for handling the paper."

Most of you probably know all of this, but there may be a thing or two that you don’t know. Or maybe you just need to be reminded.
 
10. We usually like to print color on coated paper. For most applications, coated paper is best for color, but some excellent work can be done on uncoated papers, especially text and cover or opaque grades.

NPES is monitoring the unfair trade practice cases filed by three U.S. paper manufacturers and a workers’ union, which allege that China and Indonesia are harming the U.S. paper industry by providing unfair support to their domestic paper manufacturers that export to the United States.

Coated paper declined more than any other sector during the recession, but it is also experiencing the greatest bounce-back as advertising and direct mail expenditures that were cut during the recessiont are now rebounding.