Who Says Everything That Can Be Digital Will Be? Not I.

One of our industry's most prolific inventors and an incredible impresario of new technology is Benny Landa. In addition to inventing the Indigo press, he helped generate tremendous excitement for the potential of digital print. Then he sold the business to HP where it is reaching its next stage of successful development.

Whenever Benny Landa makes a presentation, often to standing-room-only crowds, he includes these memorable words: “Everything that can be digital, will be digital.” The inexorable nature of the progress toward digital has played out in many respects as he forecast. But that was before digital books appeared on the Sony Reader, before e-greeting cards, e-zines, Global Positioning Satellites and Garmin maps, and the tremendously popular iPod and iPhone.

So just how digital have we become? And how much more digital will we get? U.S. consumers have been quick to adopt some things, like iPods, but slow to move to e-Books like Amazon's Kindle. GPS is becoming such a pervasive commodity that police report spikes in car break-ins to steal them. But as we've cited before, some are non-starters—digital greeting cards that went nowhere, and those slow-moving digital book readers that haven't quite caught on. And we see the continual rise of fat new magazine titles for highly targeted interests. The death of newspapers is highly exaggerated by a trembling corps of newspaper reporters. More threatened are such original digital behemoths as Yahoo and AOL.

Likewise, reports tell of the growing gap between e-mail marketers' use of their medium and consumers' declining interest in responding. Forrester Research, in “Break Free From Bad Email,” tries to pin the blame on bad practices—poor opt-in procedures and bad copywriting, for example—causing diminished perception and attrition.

Forrester's Julie Katz says the cheap and easy e-mail coaxed many marketers to overuse e-mail. Couple this with Internet service providers' increasing use of the spam filters —Lyris ISP Deliverability Study reports 20% and, in some cases, 62% of e-mail ended in junk mail filter boxes—and the digital surfeit is apparent. It's another case of something that could be digital not being digital. Why, just the other day Milt Vine from Seattle Bindery sent me an e-mail telling me his e-newsletter was being blocked by my corporate spam filters.

Here's another example of something digital running aground. The Securities and Exchange Commission has helped public firms cut print and mailing costs by allowing shareholders to view e-proxy statements and vote online. But when Broadbridge Financial (it handles stockholder communications for 13,000 public firms) studied the results for the Wall St. Journal, it found online communications weren't working so well. Out of 80 publicly traded firms that have switched to e-voting, on average just 4.6% of individual shareholders voted electronically, a sharp decline from the 19.2% who voted the year before with printed paper ballots.

Broadbridge estimated that the 103 companies it surveyed saved $29 million on printing and postage. Savings, yes, but at what price? If shareholder oversight plummets, how does public oversight of companies take place? Under this e-proxy system, public firms only have to post annual reports and information about directors on the Internet. (Large companies were required to begin posting in January; smaller firms have until next January.)

A trip to Capitol Hill is in order for our print industry lobbyists. While you're there, ask for some money to assure we maintain universal postal service, and a shift to mail-in general elections, too!

bill.esler@reedbusiness.com