This Is Truly Print's Future

It is only fitting that my last message as Public Printer of the United States be to the readers of Graphic Arts Monthly, which I started reading 50 years ago when it was still in a digest format. Most of what I knew early on about the art and craft of printing, and of the printing industry, came from my late-night study of each page. What a treasure trove of information: industry personalities, paper and ink samples, articles about printing and binding processes, advertisements for type founders in far-off places, people pushing a process I had never seen: “offset lithography.” I loved it all.

I still do. When meeting someone new, invariably I am asked, “And what do you do?” For 53 years, my answer remains: “I am a printer.”

Not much has changed in our industry in that time. We still see printing as an art whereby one master is made, and a craft in which many copies are efficiently reproduced from it. We still value an experienced pressman's eye over the most sophisticated instrumentation. Costs of printing on paper have edged upwards, but not too much—about the rate of overall inflation. Life is good.

Or, is it? What about those dirt-cheap electronic reading devices that can continually refresh and change pages without using consumables? (No cutting trees, no burning oil for electricity to drive paper mills, no de-inking, no filling solid waste dumps.) Those devices come in all manner of disguises, from PDAs to book readers, to navigation systems, to computers and television screens.

Do you suppose people now read and view more information on electronic devices than paper? Which way do you see the trend going? Is there any traditional printing category that is safe: labels, forms, trade books, telephone directories, magazines, reference and research books, catalogs, newspapers, government printing?

These and many others are the questions debated at the Government Printing Office during the last four years. What are the early 21st century definitions of printing? According to Merriam-Webster, “To display on a surface (as a computer screen) for viewing” is now one of them.

At GPO, we've come to the conclusion that we have no idea what the future of printing will be or how people will prefer to receive and use documents five years from now, let alone 50 years or 500 years from now. But because the law requires the Public Printer to make all the published documents of the three branches of government readily available to our citizens now and in perpetuity, we've had to devise a new strategy for dealing with federal information in the digital age.

I bid you to review at www.gpo.gov the progress being made by GPO on the federal government's Future Digital System (FDSys). It will create a common denominator of all past, present and future government documents. It will be able to deliver information to the World Wide Web, to platesetters, digital presses, CD-ROM and DVD recorders, and whatever the future holds. All of this while ensuring users the authenticity of the information, managing versions and maintaining the integrity of the digital data in perpetuity. This is the future of “printing.”

It makes me wish I was again 11 years old, starting fresh in our industry, which surely offers some of the richest and most rewarding future careers.