The future of print may not be decided by the producers and purveyors of print, but rather by the rise of technologies that are completely outside their control.

Recently Stephen Beals of Printoolz.com asked for comments on print’s future and the linking of print to the internet, particularly with regard to recent technologies such as USBInsert and the SixthSense demonstration at TED. (For the full text of Stephen’s comment go here.)

The SixthSense stuff is amazing in many ways, even if rudimentary. My first response to the USBInsert (TM, SM, ©, ® PatentPending, etc.) is that this is the sort of thing that gets patent examiners in hot water. I could not readily find the details on patentstorm.com, but the general idea of taking some 10-year-old tech and gluing it to some die-cut cardboard hardly seems like it should be granted a patent. Perhaps there is some more original aspect of this device that I am missing. At least it pertains to some physical implementation, unlike the dildoid business model patents so rampant a few years back.

One of Stephen’s comments is that printing URLs in ads or copy is a waste of ink. I don’t have any data to dispute this (I don’t know if Stephen has any data to support it) but it just seems counter-intuitive — I look them up all the time. I think the problem (or one problem) is that such actions are difficult to track and/or very few people go to the trouble of tracking. It requires some work and forethought to setup any of the various trackable response loops, and it’s tough to do so without raising the effort level enough the reader just blows it off.

However, if your copy has raised the proper emotional state, and your URL is properly positioned as holding satisfaction for that state, and the action required is easy enough, why wouldn’t people do it? I do. I think that’s what USBInsert is trying to do – reduce the action component to near zero
while adding easy trackability.

Security issues with mass-distribution USB devices are significant, but security awareness in the general population is pretty low so that’s probably not a show-stopper. I just think USBInsert is swapping one kind of complexity for another with little net gain — you still have to tear out the little device and take it to some computer and plug it in. Can’t you type a simple URL in less time?

I recently listened to a web conference about the future of print media where HarperCollins talked about QR code implementation, and metaio, Inc. discussed augmented reality. Both are interesting, although coming from entirely different perspectives on interactivity for print.

QR codes are already being used in other countries that are more advanced in their mobile infrastructure than the US. Here we have to first get manufacturers to put the necessary software into smartphones, get carriers to sell the smartphones, and then get a preponderance of users to buy those smartphones. That could take a decade or longer. By that time devices similar to SixthSense could well be on the market making the whole exercise somewhat moot, although I suppose QR codes could be used to point the devices to meta-information provided directly by the advertiser/publisher.

In the end the future of printing could be completely outside the control of print producers, relying mostly on technology over which they have no control. There’s a real danger the industry will make the mistake Adobe made with PDF, and utterly misread their place in an online world. It’s not that print should go quietly into that good night but, as Peter Drucker said in Innovation and Entrepreneurship:

Innovation requires us to systematically identify changes that have already occurred but whose full effects have not yet been felt, and then to look at them as opportunities. It also requires existing companies to abandon rather than defend yesterday.