Blabla Point: Why Printernet Publishing wil save the world and my retirement account

The Printernet is the Cloud based network that connects printing enterprises around the world.

It is massive parallel manufacturing with standards-based interfaces, real time production information and easy access for everyone. Each printer — the combination of the machinery and the intelligence that manages the machinery — is a print output node. Each node is both part of the network and self-sufficient. When the nodes are working together mass customization of print product becomes commonplace at previously impossible speeds and quantities. It means hundreds of millions of print product delivered around the world in a day or two with a minimal carbon foot print.

The Printernet has three moving parts; the OEM, the OPM and the VAR.

The OEM manufactures, distributes and continuously improves the machinery and supplies necessary to print. The OPM - original product manufacturer - uses the machinery and adds the intelligence and supplies to manufacture print. The VAR works with the end user to select the most appropriate products and software to create a new value for the customer. The customer supplies the energy, usually but not always, in the form of money, to power the whole thing.

Managing the network falls to the UNF - the user network facilitator. This function is primarily self evolving, but as the network matures necessary parts will be increasingly taken on by formal organizations and enterprises.

The Battle of the Titans is for the number 1, 2 and 3 OEM/UNF positions.

Like all resilient networks each level is self sufficient
A printernet can have a self sufficient presence in a school building or a school district. The UNF/VAR is the MPS. The OEM are the MFP manufacturers. The MPS chooses the most appropriate hardware and software for that specific local situation. Each is different in the details. Each is the same at the conceptual level. Print from the Cloud is enabled at the desktop, the workgroup or the CRD within the organization.

The new experience occurs when the school based printernet is seamlessly connected to commercial printernets. At that point production equipment is clipped on as a print output node - an OPM. That allows yearbooks, student newspapers and textbooks to be pulled from the ground and delivered in print in very close to real time.

The local commercial OPM is connected to a regional printernet. Newspapers can accumulate content in the Cloud on an ongoing basis consistent with the way that events occur in real time. When interest based communities form, the appropriate content is pulled from the Cloud and print manufacturing occurs to satisfy that particular interest. The VAR are the reporters and editors. Their job is know which slice of information is interesting to what group. They use their experience, website + transinfo analytics and web 2.0 to identify and anticipate the emergence of communities of interest.

The regional printernet is connected to the global printernet. From the Cloud the physical location of the OPM is irrelevant. Space and time disappear as a limiting factor on distribution of print product. Anyone, anywhere, anytime can originate content. Any OPM anywhere can manufacture the print product that captures that information. VARs are distributed all over the planet. Pulling just the right content in just the right format at the just the right time for just the right person.

The save the world part revised May 10, 6:00 EDT
Complexity begets Black Swans. To respond to them, every one and every thing has to get much smarter, much faster. When smart has power at the top of the pyramid, it unleashes the huge reservoirs of smart at the bottom.

If the question is "Stupid" - the inability to think systematically and ignorance - the answer is the "Printernet" - Print for the thinking part and the Internet for the ignorance part.

Now for the retirement account part
Print is the ignored step child of the media industry. Analysts and investors have not yet noticed that a printernet is growing. Nor do they appreciate that print is the best artifact to deliver information for the masses of people on the globe or in a community or in a school. That's fine with me. The longer they don't get the signal through the blabla internet blablabla twitter blablabla youtube, the longer I have to find under priced companies.

On February 17, I started to assemble a print based portfolio in my IRA. It started with Oce, Xerox, Ricoh, Kodak. Sometime in the last two weeks I added McClatchey, Gannett, Consolidated Graphics and Donnelly.

As of this morning
Oce +114.35%
24 Jetstreams in place in commercial establishments around the globe.
Gannett +49.56%
McClatchey +26.82%
Newspapers are not dying. Print is not dead.
Ricoh +22.57%
Xerox +10.4%
Add HP and they are fighting for the 1,2, 3 positions in enterprise printernet.
Consolidated +9.07%
Donnelly - .39%
Both in the commercial printernet space with national and global footprints.
Kodak -22.66%
Still has to unlock the value of their dominance of offset workflow.

No doubt there are other many players. DaiNippon Screen, Canon, KM, etc.
There are resilient printernets growing in Europe and Australia. Probably others in India, China and South East Asia.

On the ground the big box stores (Staples) and the franchises ( Fedex, AlphaGraphics, Sir Speedy, and knowledge based networks like Crouser) are competing for local community printernets.

For the purposes of investing HP is too entangled with computers to get a view of their Print piece. Same story with IBM. Same story different details for FEDEX or UPS. Actually it's also a similar story for Kodak with different details.

Still to become visible are the global composition companies. They may turn out to be the real winners as they supply the link between physical and digital. They are the UNFs who can produce PDF's and print data streams at the appropriate scale at the appropriate speeds. In a network the greatest value is created by OPMs that provide the links.

At any rate, it's a whole new set of reasons to love Print! Also, I have new found appreciation of blablabla.

The Printernet Gets Some Media

Ok, it's not really media as much as my most recent column.

The title is 'Printernet' Vision Brings Custom Print Publications to Masses. You can read the full thing at PBS.org /MediaShift. If you get a chance, stop by at PBS and leave some comments.

The first four paragraphs are pasted below:

Imagine networked desktop publishing where the desktops and printers are spread throughout the whole world. Publishing means newspapers, newsletters, books and posters in mass market quantities, but versioned and personalized for specific communities and individual users.

From the point of view of a writer, it would be easier than ever to see your story in print. If you're a publisher, it means an efficient way to move from the web to print products that can attract advertising. If you are an advertiser, it means one more mass media with a low carbon footprint, unparalleled reach and a clear way to know if it's working. For the citizen, it means the world as bookstore.

In the jargon of networks, this so-called "printernet" can have the same benefits as the Internet -- massive parallel manufacturing with standards-based interfaces, real time production information and easy access for everyone. Each printer -- the combination of the machinery and the intelligence that manages the machinery -- is a print output node.

Each node is both part of the network and self-sufficient. When the nodes are working together mass customization of print product becomes commonplace at previously impossible speeds and quantities. Some recent developments illustrate the potential for printernet technology to enter the mix of communication media.

The subheads and first sentences are:

The Printernet for Newspapers
Some good examples of printernet technology in action come from Oce, a digital press manufacturer based in the Netherlands.

The Printernet for Magazines
Recently, luxury automaker Lexus joined forces with American Express Publishing to put together a printernet experiment called Mine magazine.


The Printernet for Wikis
Separate from the commercial world, some information on the web wants to be available in print form for off-line consideration and mass distribution.

and the last paragraph..

Print product manufactured in just a couple traditional printing plants is too limited. The energy costs and carbon footprint of long range delivery make them unsustainable. Global access, which Wikipedia has achieved on the web, needs a well developed, reliable, global print output network. That's the potential tipping point path for the printernet.

The New Opportunity for Print is the PRinternet: Ground>Cloud>Print

I've been on a soapbox recently about the "PRinternet" and business news. The argument is that business journalism is very broken. We all know what misinformation is spread by the business press. In the last couple of weeks, Kodak has been the primary victim, but it is an ongoing expensive problem for every large organization.

In case you missed it, the issue is going mainstream. It started when John Stewart went after Cramer. Then it was continued in the New York Times. Last night, March 13, there was a 15 minute segment on PBS with very serious people from the Journalism schools discussing the failures of the business press.

Update from Meet the Press Sunday March 15: The business press and the now the role of "Journalism" in the run up to the war in Iraq gets 5 or 10 minutes is now even more mainstream. The window for bypassing the press with a PRinternet solution is now open.

One strand of the discussion is about "exposing" business. The much more important thread, most clearly articulated by Stewart, is about the media using hype to increase the eyeball count with no regard for the effect that hype was having on real people. This dovetails with the growing realization in the marketing world that the game is no longer about "eyeballs."

The financial implosion of the over leveraged organizations of the newspaper industry is focusing a much larger discussion about the nature of news (information) delivery in our advanced industrial society. Since they are having such a hard time getting anything to work a moment of innovation might be at hand.

Over there it's about Kodak. Over here it's about the PRinternet.
Yesterday, my regular "Print Correspondent" column appeared at PBS.Media Shift. In that venue I'm talking to internet focused journalism people. They are still trapped by "Print is Dead" story so what I'm saying here would not make any sense over there. Over there, I pointed to

The Newspaper Association of America reports that the Chicago Tribune's Triblocal.com uses Kodak's Microzone Publishing Solution to create 35 websites and eight weekly newspapers catering to diverse, hyper-local neighborhoods in suburban Chicago. The full run of the eight weeklies is 100,000. In the language of "versioned print," that means eight versions, 12,500 each.

And that the real problem is fixing the ad sales process.

As journalism is going through fundamental changes, the system for selling print ads is mired in the past. For print ads to activate the presently under-served large market of small business, it means ad sales people will need to be accessible to small and micro-business people for a quick conversation to do the deal. Few small and micro-businesses have the time to focus to buy on the Internet.

It's about the new value that can be created by the "PRinternet"
PRinternet is a term I'm using to capture one vision of Distribute and Print. It's related to "Ground > Cloud > Print." Consider the value created if the PRinternet existed. It could print and deliver more than 700,000,000 "News-on- Print Product" - versioned for micro communities - with a minimal carbon footprint in a couple of days. (Note that "700,000,000" is a stand in for a gezillion. You'll find the thinking behind the "math" in a previous post.)

The micro communities might include a "market segment", or a school building or a hospital or a local political party. For me, this passes the all important "how cool would that be" test.

Getting from here to there
The most plausible path is that this will be driven by the needs of the newspaper industry and/or the political campaigns of 2010. The other possibility is that will be driven from corporate communication departments working with their Public Relations firms.

From now until then -when there is real evidence of demand pull - the opportunity is to do as many low risk proof-of-concept projects as possible. The speed and repetition can be sustained if they bring new work into our PSP's and be a laboratory for business development. "If there is no path to scale, don't do it."

In education, I know that Oce and Xerox have a long history of doing publishing projects for students. I would not be surprised to find that others have done the same. In addition to doing the Good Work, every one of these publishing projects can be framed in getting the systems in place for resilient local networks that can be plugged into growing nodes of the PRinternet.

In the News business, as I point out in my column, hyperlocal news is going mainstream.

The New York Times is going into the hyper-local news business, as reported by Zachary Seward at the NiemanJournalismLab. It is just one example of hyper-local -- also called community journalism, beat reporting, or representative journalism -- in action. Other instances include Kennesee State university Professor Leonard Witt's Representative Journalism in Georgia and community news site Patch.com. It's not clear how successful the Times' move to start hyper-local blogs will be, since, as long as a strategy is web only, it's going to be hard to get to sustainability.

The Hard Part is Changing the 20th Century Business Culture
In a value chain business environment, secrecy and "proprietary" IP is a competitive advantage.
Now that input-transform- output has moved much closer to the ground, large value chain organizations are being pushed into becoming facilitators of user networks. But the closed culture of value chains is exactly the opposite of the open culture of user networks.

No one organization can control a network. The internet has made that completely clear. AOL, the undsiputed leader at the start tried to apply that thinking. It failed not because of the Time Warner purchase. It fails and continues to struggle, because their abiding pride that they could be the 'Portal" to the Internet. Portal strategy does not work in a user network economy.

Learn from the Internet.
Open source. Modular functionalities. Growth happens from the ground up, not from the top down. Explosive growth happens when people on the ground have the choice to use the best tool for the job they want to do today.

The newspapers took a long time to change their culture. They are paying dealing for the time it took. But that is now changing.

The interesting new functionalities include a group of "competitors" in Ohio, who are now freely exchanging their stories and trying to get out of their commitments to the AP. In Iowa, a private held local media company, has reorganized their operation so that the general editor is "a conductor of the information orchestra." The print piece is not yet mainstream, but that is the opportunity for the industry. Reuters meanwhile has released Calais, and the most recent developments built on top of it, were reported today at Nieman Journalism Lab.

Free advice
Consider the "PRinternet" not only as the silly buzzword it might be. Look past the word to the reality it is tryng to capture. I'm seeing a very large, under served, addressable market and eplosive growth opportunities for Print going forward at least for a decade.

Xerox: The printernet for education and erasable paper for MPS

My column, that will be posted later this week at PBS MediaShift , is about the printernet. The subheads in the story are the Printernet for Newspapers (Oce). The printernet for magazines (mine magazine). The printernet for wikis (pediapress.com).

But what I really wanted to write about is the printernet for education. Maybe I'll find it before the next column in two weeks.

Remember my personal goal is to reinvent high school education. From what I see my favorite team, Xerox, is in just right position to do it faster than anyone else. But, keep in mind, I also root for the New York Mets and really like the Chicago Cubs.

Free advice mostly to Xerox, but for whoever else is visiting
Get in touch with the folks who run the Wikipedia Foundation and/or the team at pediapress.org. Figure out the fastest way to replace Textbooks with WikiBooks. If Oce and/or Kodak is visiting, you can replace Textbooks with WikiNewspapers. Imploding newspaper companies might love the idea.

To get the background for the call, follow the links starting from here. You can download the source code to turn wikis into printable PDFs, ODF or DocBooks(XML), here.

Step two is to figure out either an affiliate deal or a reseller program so the ground force can sell wiki2 print and Google Apps. And get out of the software busyness as gracefully as possible.

In case, you missed the press release in 2007, here's an excerpt.

DECEMBER 13, 2007 - ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA: The Wikimedia Foundation today announced a partnership that will make it possible to obtain high quality print and word processor copies of articles from Wikipedia and other wiki educational resources. The development of the underlying open source software is supported by the Open Society Institute (www.soros.org) and the Commonwealth of Learning (www.col.org), and led by PediaPress.com, a start-up company based in Germany.
. . .
This technology is of key strategic importance to the cause of free education world-wide," said Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. "It will make it possible to use and remix wiki content for a variety of purposes, both in the developing and the developed world, in areas with connectivity and without.

Erasable Paper?
Why is it always a start up team that gets it done?

I'm betting there are at least 3 start up teams in India, 6 in Germany and a couple of others around the world, that have either already read the patents or figured out another way to do the same thing.

Or perhaps two brilliant engineers in either Palo Alto or France will do another Adobe. They'll figure out a way to partner with a foundation. Do some modifications to make sure they don't violate non competes and do it themselves for governments, health and education around the world to make some money and save lots of energy.

That worked out pretty well in 1982 for John Warnock and Charles Geschke. Not so well for the home team.

Lessons from the past and the "PRinternet"

This morning I found an unusual post by Tim Windsor at the Neiman Journalism Lab. He said,

I try not to do too many of those “You’ve got to read this” posts. But you’ve got to read this. Clay Shirky:

So I did.

Usually when searching through the internet you find blog posts, such as you find at this blog. Every rare once in a while you come across an essay. This is a very good essay.

Shirky says we are living through the 21st century replay of the 1500's. I agree. Last time it was a network of print enterprises.. This time it will be a network of networks of print output, both machines and print enterprises. That's the reality I'm trying to capture with the term "The PRinternet."

Below are two excerpts from Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable .

Elizabeth Eisenstein’s magisterial treatment of Gutenberg’s invention, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, opens with a recounting of her research into the early history of the printing press. She was able to find many descriptions of life in the early 1400s, the era before movable type. Literacy was limited, the Catholic Church was the pan-European political force, Mass was in Latin, and the average book was the Bible. She was also able to find endless descriptions of life in the late 1500s, after Gutenberg’s invention had started to spread. Literacy was on the rise, as were books written in contemporary languages, Copernicus had published his epochal work on astronomy, and Martin Luther’s use of the press to reform the Church was upending both religious and political stability."

What Eisenstein focused on, though, was how many historians ignored the transition from one era to the other. To describe the world before or after the spread of print was child’s play — those dates were safely distanced from upheaval — but what was happening in 1500? The hard question Eisenstein’s book asks is “How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?”

Chaotic, as it turns out.

This is the heart of the matter for our industry:

If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other.

"Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and run" is still true for offset printing. Still true for production digital printing. No longer true for printing at home, the work group, or the classroom. But it doesn't have to be a zero-sum game.

The New Value Created by a PRinternet
Alvin Toffler says the deep fundamentals are Time and Space. After 40 years, the internet has redefined Time to "now." and Space to "everywhere people live in communities." Every product wants to be available now. Every information product wants to be in the language of the Space into which it is delivered.

In a previous post I blue skyed how it is plausible to believe that a "PRinternet" could enable 700,000,000 print products versioned for hyper and micro communities produced and delivered in a couple of days, with a minimal carbon footprint. The exact number is irrelevant. The issue is that it could be produced closer and closer to now and delivered in any quantity to anywhere close to a Print output node.

Below is a mash up built on Shirky's paragraphs to try to clarify how this might play out.

. . . descriptions of life in the early 2000's, the era before the PRinternet. On a global scale and at the bottom of the pyramid, literacy was limited. In all parts of society the ability to think logically was an ongoing challenge. As nation states were losing their power in the face of the most recent stage of globalization, implicit tribal divisions were becoming the basis for violent conflict. Science was written in specialized language, unaccessible to both politicians and citizens. Education, while expensive, had only minimal effect on those whose learning styles did not fit the value chain model of education. The fruits of the breathtaking medical innovations had yet to help more than a fraction of the world's population.

By 2020, when the PRinternet was only 10 years old, literacy was on the rise as information organized on the the web was fixed and distributed in space defined world on paper. Books, posters and newsLetters (newspapers for micro audiences) are written in the language of hyper local and micro local communities they serve. As Print enters the space of communities, micro cultures move closer to civility and responsibility.

A Defensible Advantage of Print
The advantage of print over the internet is that Print starts conversations. The last paragraph describes what I mean. the context is K-12 education.

If it's a book, a publishing party is in order. If it's a newspaper, the students talk about it in the lunchroom and the classroom. If it's a poster, students see a new information addition to the hallways, as they listen on their iPods, text message their friends and twitter to their posse.

Journalists + Print + Web in K -12 Education
Students work with teachers-as- mentors to write their own "textbooks" and "supplementaries." The focus that organizes the curricular content changes with the ever changing focus of the class group. The specific content also depends on information harvested from on line, real time diagnostic testing of each student.

The form of publishing is chosen as appropriate. Day to day, the content is organized in the Cloud and published to the Screen, appropriate to each student's learning style. A key element of education has become nurturing a responsible civil culture. Culture grows best in small groups - like familes, or "people like us." Print is the vehicle of choice for an information laden cultural artifact.

Every school and some classes have their own newspaper. But the newspaper has become central to the process of education. A team composed of an educator, an editor, a writer with the help of a designer manage the school newspaper.

The educator clarifies the standards and content the students need. The editor selects just the right stories from the morgue and current events. The writer produces a couple of hundred words and captions to frame the stories for a specific community of students.

Before publishing to Print, the newspaper is published to the screen. Students have a week to read and comment. The editor and educator go through the comments to find the most interesting threads. They ask just the right questions to move the discussion forward. As the threads get complex, the moderator -educator, editor, journalist as circumstances dictate- intervenes.

At the end of the week, the Screen version is ported to Print. The Print can be a book, a magazine, a newsletter, a newspaper, a banner or a poster. It will depend on what best moves toward the educator's goals. As standards evolve, there is a "Print as" button on the screen and/or someplace to go to talk to a person. (Staples? Costco? WalMart? local printer? a publishing center in the building? a local newspaper?) In either case, once ordered, it enters the PRinternet. Two days later it is in the teacher's hand.

If it's a book, a publishing party is in order. If it's a newspaper, the students talk about it in the lunchroom and the classroom. If it's a poster, students see a new information addition to the hallways, as they listen on their iPods, text message their friends and twitter to their posse.

HP got the clicks on Printernet Publishing for Magazines . . . and some free advice for Xerox

Now if HP would only spin off it's Indigo and toner business, I could add that new organization to my 401K.

Until they do that, there is no way I want to figure out how they are going to make that Compaq purchase work. Given that Cisco is going into the server business, that whole thing looks like a loser to me. Add to that Google, IBM and Amazon in the Cloud business, I can't see how HP is going to get any margins in that line of work.

Anyway,

You can find out what the Ace Group has to say about printernet publishing for magazines at OnDemand. They still describe it as VDP blablabla. Did you ever meet anyone aside from a vendor who is excited by VDP? It's database publishing. It has always been database publishing. It will continue to be database publishing.

And just a little snarky note: "the secret to completing the VDP puzzle" is to find the customers who want to buy it. Everything else is just technology. PSP's have always been awesome at installing technology when a customer is willing to pay for the product. It's why I love PSPs.

Time, date and location – 12:00-12:50, Tuesday, March 31, Room 201B of the Pennsylvania Convention Center

Session title – "Completing the VDP Puzzle: Your Guide to Successfully Implementing VDP Capabilities"

Speaker – Val DiGiacinto, vice president of sales and partner, The Ace Group, New York City

Anyone else seeing a pattern?
Indigo sales have been going pretty well + Consolidated bought 36 Indigos and I assume have them up and running at their multiple locations + the Ace Group is producing "mine" on it's Indigo presses + MarketSplash has gone live.

Makes one wonder where the presses are located that will fulfill orders from MarketSplash. Consolidated? The Ace Group? Indigo PSP's around the country? I'm pretty sure it's not going to be the super efficient gang run offset they do over at VistaPrint.

I'm thinking Consolidated sales people are out there now looking for magazines to printernet publish. Meanwhile, the Ace Group already has the track record with Time, Inc and American Express. Plus they're in New York where all the big publishers are still located.

So... what might it look like?
I'm still seeing the same thing:

HP is trying to grab the whole enchilada. Consumers/mSB with MarketSplash. Magazines with printernet publishing on widely distributed Indigos. Enterprises with HP printers which most IT people love. If they connect the enterprise to commercial print, MPS morphs into BPO.
BPO is one of the backbones of the printernet.

What about everyone else?
Ricoh/IBM will fight it out with HP. Ricoh/IBM have the lead with massive scale Transpromo at the CMO level. As far as I can tell they're not interested in SMB.

Oce will continue their domination of books. If they can make a deal with Kodak, they could dominate the newspaper market as it moves to mass customization and hyper local newspapers. Kodak meanwhile could increase their lead in heat set web offset, moving from newspapers to lights out manufacturing for short run magazines.

Cannon? KM? Kyocera? I don't have a clue, except to think they are still trying to figure out what's their next moves.

And that leaves my home team, Xerox.

Free advice for Xerox
Education, education, education, government.
Education is the Global Defense Industry for the next era. Education means global security. Global security is job one for everyone. Plus instead of firing people you could be helping them make a transition into education. It's cheaper for us stock holders and a better way to reduce those pension liabilities. If GM can offer their people a buy out, you should be able to do the same.

1. Forget about pushing color.
Everybody has color. Color is a commodity. Everyone expects color. After a gezillion dollars invested, everyone gets it. WikiBooks (the emerging replacement for textbooks) are printed in Black only. The cheapest, fastest way to get information is in Black only. Black only is much more sustainable. The Nuvera's, by all accounts, are awesome machines.

Sure, the "growth in color" produces some nice numbers for Wall Street, but those folks are getting more irrelevant every day. Once the betting stops, the new game is sustainable revenue and dividends. The market will probably hover at around 7,500 to 8,500 for a couple of years now that the funny money has disappeared. No funny money, no big increases in stock price.

2. Focus on the perfect binding piece.
Find the PSP's in your network that have perfect binding functionality. Work out a really good deal, from the POV of the PSP's, to integrate perfect binding into their Print Output Nodes. While Oce's machines are good for central location distribution of books, Nuvera's + perfect binding could win for Distribute and Print in many locations. Every school district should be printing their own WikiBooks. Every University in-house should be doing the same.

3. Get in touch with the Wikipedia Foundation and PediaPress.com.
Do a good deal so they have easy access to the Xerox printernet. The software is open source. Everybody loves Wikipedia. They need the revenue. Xerox has the distributed print output nodes in place. Indigos can't compete in this market. Besides they don't have a Black only machine, as far as I know.

4. Stop thinking you have to own this business.
Nobody is going to own this business, just like nobody owns the internet. Not HP. Not IBM. Not Google. Not Amazon. Not anyone. Meanwhile, advertising is in much too much chaos to see a clear path. Direct mail is being completely redefined. No one can yet tell where it's going to land. My personal bet is that mass mailings go away in a couple of years.

Paying for printernet publishing, the next big media

Printernet publishing would allow message makers to speak directly to their audiences without the intervention of the media. There is no technical reason to stop a PDF file or a data stream being distributed to a network of PSPs and produce millions of copies distributed around the globe or 3000 copies for a neighborhood, with a minimal carbon footprint.

It might first appear that this is a solution looking for a problem. But it's becoming clear that the problem of mainstream media is adjusting to a world where grown ups are in charge and the nature of journalism is moving away from "gotcha." It is inexorably moving towards finding the stories that inspire and what Malcolm Gladwell describes as solving mysteries instead of puzzles.

As the mainstream media adjusts, it opens space for a printernet to grow.

In Saturday's post, I quoted David Eaves, an expert in negotiation and public policy who works with two spin-offs of the Harvard Negotiation Project, Common Outlook and Vantage Partners and as a fellow at the Centre for the Study of Democracy at Queen's University.

He correctly noted that

a reshaping of credibility from objectivity to transparency, would have profound implications for every organization – corporate, non-profit and governmental – in our society.

And then today there appeared an article at Miller McCune Magazine. It reports an experiment that finds citizens prefer political news un-mediated by journalists and vice versa.

Most political leaders would generally like to get out their messages without a media that often adds its own twist to the story. And more and more, they actually are trying to do so: Some are putting up their own videos on YouTube.com; others are now sending out their own Twitter feeds.

Imagine if politicians had the ability to printernet publish. They could get a 4 page newsletter, versioned for every important niche audience in their constituency delivered in a day or so from the time they hit the print button.

That's just of the many problems, the printernet would solve.

Miller-McCune Online Magazine:
"According to a new study, one consequence might be that citizens would feel better about the political process. They'd be less cynical; they'd think politics was more representative. At least, that's what Brian J. Fogarty, a professor of political science at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, and Jennifer Wolak, a professor of political science at the University of Colorado, Boulder found. Their study is published in the January issue of American Politics Research."

To assess how people might respond to political information when they read it as news as opposed to when they get it directly from politicians, they had one group read a news article and one group read dueling editorials from prominent political leaders on one of three issues — affirmative action, drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), and stem cell research. In each test, the article and the editorials contained the same information and perspectives.

The two groups were then asked to respond. "Do you feel that the views presented in the article reflect the opinion of ordinary Americans?" Of those who got the news directly from politicians, roughly 45 percent said yes, the views were representative of ordinary Americans. Of those who read the news articles, meanwhile, only 16 percent found the views representative. (The results were generally consistent across the three issues). That adds up to a pretty sizeable difference, given that both groups were presented with the same information.

The printernet in 2006

There are no new ideas. But being too early has the same consequences as being too late.

During the dot.com era, I co founded a start up called Chapbooks.com. We enabled student publishing with what was state of the art technology in 1998. During our two years, we produced 5 x 7 paperback books -"real books" - for more than 2500 English teachers in "classroom packs" of 30 copies each.

Our dot.com burned through $1.5 million. Our educational partners were Great Source, a division of Houghton Mifflen and J.L Hammett Co. The crashed wiped us out.

What's different today is variable QR codes. As Mosaic was to the internet, so variable QR codes will be to the printernet. But these days, I'm just a retired printer/ blogger, so what do I know.

I hope Richard Swift is still in the game.

from http://theprinternet.com/

Welcome to the birth of The Printernet - The first day of Ipex 2006
Today it is a baby, just a few key domain names, this one-page website and a development plan.
Come back in a month and it will be growing.
Come back in a year and it will have grown a lot. Worldwide in fact.
The Printernet will enable work ordered in London, for a sales office in Hong Kong, to be printed and delivered by a local network member.

The Printernet will bring new business to Printers round the world.

Please contact Richard Swift in London

+44 208 788 5370

Cell +44 7940 577458

Nice one for InfoPrint: ADF on a global scale = Printernet

ADF = Automated Document Factory = OPM = Original Product Manufacturer. A global network of standards based OPM's = the Printernet. If it lived in a school district it would be an education printernet.

InfoPrint Unveils Postal Optimization ADF Solution
from WhatTheyThink
Tuesday, May 19, 2009

BOULDER, CO -- InfoPrint Solutions Company, the joint venture between IBM and Ricoh, today announced the creation of the Postal Optimization ADF Solution to maximize postal discounts, minimize waste and enable a more productive, streamlined printing environment. This ADF workflow Intelligent Mail-compliant offering will help mailers see less returned mail, greater process control, lower postal rates and in certain cases, the reduction or elimination of expensive sorter equipment.

This bundled offering is built on the InfoPrint ProcessDirector (IPPD) backbone, the company's market-leading* ADF (Automated Document Factory) software technology."

Does the Printernet look like this?



Or does the Printernet look like this?



Images from Holistic Quantum Reality

Independent Bookstores, the Printernet and the Bottom of the Pyramid

The problem with 20th century large organizations is that they have evolved to make money at the top of the pyramid. Now that prosumers are becoming their own VARs, the real action is at the bottom of the pyramid.

Some retailers have learned the lesson. Walmart and Costco figured it out. Starbucks not so much. Starbucks was best of breed in pushing and executing a global brand. When the funny money disappeared, they have to readjust. Now they are scrambling to succeed in a world of prosumers who can choose McDonalds - now the largest coffee seller in the country - or Dunkin Donuts at number 2. Starbucks aggregated the market for coffee that they can no longer control.

Will this play out in Print with AlphaGraphics and Staples doing most of the printing for sMB?

As in coffee, so in newspapers, education and book publishing. Borders is searching for the next way. They're testing out selling computer stuff. If they have enough time, they'll get it right. Enough time usually does cure all ills. But, once you take on debt, time is measured in monthly debt payments. If Starbucks doesn't have alot of debt, they will probably figure it out, as long as the stores keep creating a revenue stream.

The financials and GM demonstrated with brutal clarity what happens when business-time and corporate-time turns into servicing-the-debt-time. They couldn't get it right enough, fast enough. Now that the federal government is involved, the feds created time for them to reorganize and get it right, sooner or later. But power moved from the Board of Directors to the largest debt holder. Just they way it has always been.

Independent Bookstores and Facilitated User Networks
According the Boston Globe, contrary to much of the blablabla of the last couple of years, independent bookstores holding up vs. big rivals

BROOKLINE - Signs on the doors of two Coolidge Corner bookstores told a tale challenging the conventional wisdom. The one at Barnes & Noble said "Closed." The one on the independent Brookline Booksmith welcomed the chain's customers and solicited their suggestions. Now, three months after Barnes & Noble departed, Booksmith savors modest growth in the midst of a recession that's battering most retailers.

It's not about smarter or better. It's about people becoming prosumers. Prosumers have the time and the technology to become their own VARs. They are value added resellers to themselves. There could be a better word, but I think VAR's is general enough to be able to discern the patterns of a google-mart user network economy.

The vanity press is built for people who have to solve their own problem of putting their words and experience in book form. Then print OPM's used web technology to talk directly to prosumer VAR's. The value of channels was destroyed for vanity press. Prosumer VARs are focused on solving their own problems.

The opportunity of the printernet
As the PDF standard is supplemented by pricing and process standardization, a distributed print production network, which I choose to call the printernet, will become more clear.

At the appropriate level of analysis there are only three moving parts; OEM - equipment manufacturers, OPM - print manufacturers, VAR's value added resellers. The emerging publishing company will earn their money by facilitating the user network that is created by everchanging relationships between OEM-OPM-VAR.

I know nothing about the process they use, but today I did a Google on

Greenleaf Book Group, Book Publishing, Self Publishing ...

Greenleaf Book Group, one of the fastest-growing companies in America, is a New York Times bestselling publisher and distributor that specializes in the ...
www.greenleafbookgroup.com

When I clicked I found "A publisher and distributor for independent authors and small presses."

In my jargon, "independent authors" and "small presses" are OPMs. They manufacture a product of words and pictures that should live in a book. The VAR's are the independent bookstores. The value add is to connect OPMs with VARs, without the constraints of legacy channels. OEM's sell and help maintain equipment to both.

Given what they say about how they are growing, their experienced professsional staff, my take is that the Bookleaf Book Group are just in the right place to facilitate that particular user network of OEM+OPM+VARs. As the print ecology continues to evolve similar facilitators will emerge for printing. As the pieces fall into place, the printernet might be a useful word to capture a new reality.

The most sustainable kernel is an OPM that is also a VAR. They get new money from their local space. They produce product in the local space that they can monetize in their role as a VAR. For an independent bookstore this could mean be the entry point for the printernet for "independent authors and small presses" that sell the books in the independent bookstore.

Meanwhile, I guess I'll have to wait to see if Greenleaf decides to go public, so I can add them to my IRA.

Why I love "talking" to Australasians, how to fix high school education in the States, and more on textbooks going away

Still one more interesting discussion started at Print Ceo when Richard Romano did a good post on ereaders called Being Content with Content.

The Australasian in question is Andy McCourt. Mr. McCourt's day job is something about business development for OCE in Australia, but I don't know the details. He clearly loves books and loves Print. He also seems to love to blabla about either, but only as time permits. It's a rare combination which, except for the "having a day job" part, I share.

The fact that he wrote an awesome piece about the value of the printernet helped me believe that the phrase might be actually useful. When Andy told me that the Printernet is the phrase some creative independently came up with to brand the show, I was even more convinced that I may have stumbled across a useful phrase.

The original article appeared in the words-on paper edition of Print21. I'm sure that folks who attend PacPrint will see it there. But to share with everyone, I posted a words-on-the screen version at The Digital Nirvana.

At any rate, someplace in the current thread at PrintCEO, Andy said,

As I wade through my eBook Dostoyevsky, I am finding what you say is just so Michael:-convenience. In traffic, waiting around in receptions and for appointments, on a recent plane trip (where I was asked to turn it off as we commenced descent, even though e-Ink ‘paper’ uses no energy when a static page is displayed - I complied of course). So my journey with eBooks has so far revealed that they may encourage more reading - good. They may even encourage more books to be printed: “Seen the movie, bought the T-Shirt, read the e-Book, own the real book.”

My daughter has a treasured 3-volume slip-cased set of Lord of the Rings - unachievable with e-Books. She also takes half a ton of books to school, in her backpack. Maybe if these were all on the e-reader it would still achieve the desired result and reduce back injuries. Techincal manuals too, maybe?

The journey continues…the road goes ever on.

Then I said,

The description of your daughter’s back pack is the reason that I think textbooks are going to morph into combination of e readers and print on demand.

Amazon will have the big Kindle on sale in September. The big new thing is that they have made agreements with Pearson and Wiley to deliver their textbooks through Amazon. When Jobs unlocked the IP issues it enabled iTunes. I think it’s plausible to believe that Bezos will do the same for college textbooks.

The new opportunity for customized print is in K -12 education. Keep the textbook on the ereader for reference. But for the classroom, customized printernet publishing.

Doing a unit on World War I? Personalized 48 page paperbacks or mechanical bound personalized copies with wide margins for notes. The students read, highlight and take notes. The teacher collects the books to see what they’re thinking, Then the students make considered comments on a wiki. When the unit is complete, a final version is printed so that they remember what they read and what they said. Or have a publishing party.

Since I couldn't stop myself, I added one more...

"I apologize for two in a row and climbing up on my little soapbox, but this is a subject near and dear to my heart. . .

I’ve found it helpful to think of a book as either a tool, a token or a toy. The paperback was the most convenient tool for reading. It changed the landscape. I think the ereaders will do the same. Comic books were the most convenient toys, but that is being eroded by video games.

Print remains the optimal tool for learning to think logically in the sense of being able to do “compare and contrast.” It’s very inconvenient to compare and contrast on any potentially moving screen.

The new mass market value of a book is as a token.

It’s the best physical object to capture and share a memory. It’s why photo books are mass market and people still love to receive printed greeting cards. The recent Amazon HP collaboration delivering picture books of the Obama campaign, into which you can put your own picture is an example of a new kind of book that functions as a token of an important personal historical event.

It will be interesting to see how well it sells."

Since the primary purpose of this blog is to allow me to bloviate at will, I will continue ....

Consider Andy's description. “Seen the movie, bought the T-Shirt, read the e-Book, own the real book.” Exactly! The basic principle of media is "the more, the more . . . only different." Contrary to the common wisdom, media has never been a zero sum game. It is an win - win game. The best way to win is with an ESS strategy.

"Wrote the book, followed it as it was being written, bought the book."
A significant number of the best sellers in Japan were written on cell phones on the trains to work. An extraordinary phenomenon that can be understood as unlocking for the mass market the value of a book as token of memory.

The very fact that the book was written collaboratively in the Cloud created the experience that was captured in the printed book. Making that experience shareable created enormous value that was monetized by the purchase of the printed object. It's a lovely example of how the network can create a monetizable value to a commodity. It's the same mechanism that unlocks the value of publishing in K - 12.

The lesson for globals and the printernet
In a VCE (value chain economy) additional value was added to the box by advertising. "No ever got fired for hiring IBM." In a UNE (user network economy) additional value is created by collaborative creation. The amount of value created is exponentially related to the number of users/creators. The value explodes when the number of users reach some critical mass.

The new thing is that "critical mass" does not have to mean a gezillion users. For the printernet, the 24 Oce jetstreams around the globe is already a critical mass if someone facilitates the connections between them. The Color Company stores in London are a critical mass. The Alphagraphics world wide network is a critical mass. Xerox Premier Partners is a critical mass. HP's Indigo owners are a critical mass. What's next is energizing those in place networks. In a UNE, that role falls to the User Network Facilitator. In the world of evolutionary biology enzymes can be seen as User Network Facilitators.

Random Mutation, Selective Destruction
Like an enzyme in a creature, so is it in a human community. A seemingly insignificant difference can lead to a phase change that results in a creature's survival or disappearance. The process of evolution has been described as random mutation and selective retention. I think it might be better described as random mutation, selective destruction. It's like weeding a garden, pruning a bush, forest fires or reorganzing a global.

For globals and VCE - value chain economy - enterprises, behaviors continue until they don't work. Only then do new behaviors emerge. For people and small business, they respond in real time to changes in signals. When gas prices went to $4 in the States, miles driven went down about 5 or 10%. No advertising, no "social responsibility," no blablabla. Just real people adapting in real time to clear signals from a noisy messy environment.

Newspapers are only the most recent example. They've been in secular decline since the 1970s. But the legacy behavior was producing money. There is still lots of blablabla about why. Some believe it was the content. Others believe it was the monopoly position. Others believe it's the End Of Print. Others believe that the Internet Changes Everything. I happen to believe its a broken advertising business model.

Probably all the opinions are true. But as long as the money machine was working, it didn't matter. The ensuing blablabla can be fun and reveals all kinds of ways the world has always worked. It's a field day for bloviators like me. But if your day job is making money, it's just blablabla.

It's only when things don't work, that it's appropriate to do new things.
Now the newspapers will evolve into their next business form. It will most probably be some combination of versioned newspapers, web based something and finding new stuff to sell. My bet is that they will go in with both feet into the education business. At any rate, as printers we've lived through this a couple of times. In my lifetime it was cold type, then Postcript and DTP, then color separations. Many shops had their most profitable years just before they were destroyed by waves of destruction. But the ones that made it through probably have the right organizational dna to thrive in the next destructive wave.

Waves of creative destruction periodically sweep through the world. They destroy much. A tiny, often accidental difference is often the difference between life and death. Usually it's about being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Most often it's about the inability to respond fast enough to stay alive.

Evolution, Biology, DNA and organizational dna
In the world of biology and evolution, the cycle time between waves is very short. Virus dna lives 1000's of generations in a few days. The unlucky or unadaptive virus do not make it to the next generation. Because virus DNA replicates so many times, one gene attached in one way has the opportunity to move from Mexico to New York City to Japan in a matter of weeks. Or a tiny difference to DNA in monkeys can turn into AIDS.

Humans have only gone through less than 150 iterations since the time of the Greeks. The real stage of human evolution happened over the tens of thousands of generations during the Pleistocene era. Tiny differences destroyed most of that DNA after a while. What remains is the DNA that defines both our physical abilities and our cognitive frameworks. It's not only about opposable thumbs. It's about the surviving patterns in our brains that make humans love art, conversation, style, and "love" itself.

Long business cycles seem to have a 50 year periodicity. When they crash it is"interesting times." We now seem to be at the crest of the latest wave. Many business organizations are being destroyed, leaving room for more adaptive sustainable organizations to take their place. To us time bounded humans, it seems as if change happens in "tipping point" time.

But consider that earthquakes are eons in the making, but appear as tipping point events when they present. Since business is just what humans do in nature and since nature is governed by the rules of evolution, it only makes sense that the rules of evolution is the best way to make sense out of what is happening in business.

Focus on growing the printernet. Get out of the "Information Busyness."

The internet is already organizing the world's information. The printernet is the way to output the right information at the right time in the right form to the right communities.

It's a problem of scale. No single vendor or printer can get to the scale needed to create the necessary experience. Without scale, delivering the experience can not earn enough money to be sustained. The longer it takes for everyone in the network to earn money, the longer it will take for the printernet to crystallize.

In a more precise language, networks grow naturally when local ESS game strategies are embedded in systems thinking.

Imagine the value creation
President Obama has to help every American understand what the "Financial Meltdown" means. The mass media can't do it because they are limited to sound bites and manufactured drama to keep their audiences. Long form radio/TV with the space for a nuanced discussion does not work in the mass market.

The internet works, but only for a niche audience of fans. After fine tuning the best use of the internet during the campaign, the Obama team continues to deliver information to a couple of million fans. They communicate directly through their web site and deliver television through YouTube. The task at hand is to reach everyone.

So . . . the Obama staff goes to a Public Relations firm that specializes in using the printernet. Together they map out the Congressional Districts they need to reach - top, middle and bottom of the pyramid, speaking 5 different dialects of English and 6 other languages.

They harvest the information from the website to identify their fans in those communities. They will distribute the print product to everyone. They use anecdotal information from their fans on the ground to fine tune the voice. They link community journalists, both inside and outside, formal newspaper organizations to experts, both inside government, universities and outside to get the content right.

They do small proof of concept projects - beta tests - in selected communities. After incorporating what they've learned, they move to the next low hanging fruits. This sets in motion a recurring cycle of test, improve, deploy, test, improve, deploy.

When the team is ready, with the content and the versions, they pull the trigger. Within 2 days, 300,000,000 million Print products are in the community. Within a week, those Print products are in the hands of the citizens. Versioned first for Congressional District, then for type of community, then micro-versioned for health, education, private sector, small business within each community. The Print products might be in the form of newspapers, newsletters, or posters.

Getting to scale
During the dot.com bubble fortunes were spent and lost in the land grab in the information business. Ten years later, Google and Amazon seem to be the big winners. Note that Google and Amazon have remained profitable, while Auto and Finance are struggling to keep their organizations intact.

Google Apps have over 1 million users. Recently Washington DC contracted with Google to use Apps instead of Microsoft to organize the information of the local government. The reported cost is $50/per user/per year. No servers to install. No techs on the ground. Since Google has spent years in "beta" with millions of users, the GUI is optimized for ease of use.

The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

To be clear, Google's real advantage is their un equaled capacity with the best and probably the most server farms on the planet. The installed base and the software that runs it allows them to keep the marginal cost of computing very low. It gives them the freedom to price to the market and experiment at a huge scale.

If Microsoft couldn't change fast enough to leverage their ownership of the desktop, how does any print vendor seriously think they can compete in the information business.

The advantage of Print
Print on the other hand has its own disorganized but massive physical base that is virtually impossible to replicate. In yesterday's post, I referred to the Clay Shirky essay that has been creating a buzz in the blabla-o-sphere. He notes that "Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and run." That is the sustainable advantage, if and only if, they are networked to create a new experience for consumers and business.

The appropriate metric is not production time. It is the elapsed time to get the product in hand. A distributed print functionality can radically reduce, and in some cases eliminate, the time between "produced" and "in hand."

Printernet is already growing
MPS is bringing standards, metrics and therefore efficiency to formal organizations. Ubiquitous MFP's are bridging the physical document and the digital cloud. Companies such as AlphaGraphics and the other networked "copy shops" are on the ground and growing. Staples has production centers and retail outlets. Consolidated and others have built expensive and hard to replicate multi location print output nodes. Most important are the thousands of family owned print shops with deep ties to local communities.

Seeing the new value
To understand the value it's important to look at this through the lens of parallel processing. That's the production power of a network. 300 offset/digital plants x 10,000 copies. = 3,000,000 copies that can be produced and delivered in a day or so, while still leaving a massive amount of capacity.

With the additional power of versioning - both in offset, with retro fits to existing equipment and pure digital - both toner and inkjet - the new capability is to produce massive amounts of print product, customized for micro communities at an acceptable price.

Like the internet, the remaining problem is how to make money for everyone
Amazon invented affiliate marketing. Google invented ad sense. Once "word of mouth" is incented on the ground, mass market advertising is replaced by mass market selling. Networks grow naturally when local ESS game strategies are embedded in systems thinking.

Printers need a reliable base line revenue stream. As soon as they feel they have one, they will purchase whatever equipment they need, without a long sales cycle. The idea that they can generate demand by marketing their services is demonstrably false. Asking the mass of them to become "solution providers, " in addition to being bad advice, does not work. Telling them to "fight Print as commodity," is also bad advice and a losing strategy for most.

The local pieces are in place. Resellers and trade shops have been very resilient through good times and bad. As they link up , it's network arithmetic, 1+ 1+1+1+1+1+1 can equal 100.

Why the media is hosed and the opportunity for Printernet Publishing

Why is the media is hosed?
Check out President Obama's Global Town Hall. The tag line for Rachel Madow's show tonight is something like "Is President Obama going around the media?" The short answer is yes. If you look around you'll see evidence of the disintermediation of the media all around you.

The opportunity for Printernet Publishing.
People want the stories that are interesting to them. They don't want to spend the time to find those stories themselves. They want publishers to find, craft those stories and make accessible in a form that works. Given the low cost of publishing any one can be a publisher on the web. But they need a printernet to publish in the real world.

Imagine
if President Obama had the ability to do versioned newspapers or print product that could speak to different communities in their natural language focused on the issues that concern their communities.

if Corporate Communications departments could produce Print product to talk to their institutional investors directly, without the need to negotiate and manage the busyness press.

if politicians on the ground could communicate directly with their constituents.

Then imagine
if PSP's on the ground were Print Output Nodes that printed and delivered Printernet product in the service of keeping their companies top of mind for suspects, prospects, customers and clients.

Consider
The mantra is that new value is created by the network. But this is more than any empty business phrase. It is literally true. No one vendor, no one PSP can create the information experience that was never before available in the history of the world. But the silos, both in corporations and between corporations have to be bridged.

Can't we all just get along?

The wisdom of independent MPS and Printernet Publishing

There are no new ideas. Just different implementations of common sense.

From Phillips Supply House, est. 1893. The largest dedicated supplier of Digital Equipment in North Central Pennsylvania.

I am working with an outside print organization right now to move one of my customers to the model of 1 to 10 desktop/workgroup printer, 10 to 100 workgroup printer, 100 to 500 CRD printer, and over 500 to web press.

And the next day,

This seems to be the direction the "print for pay" world is going. Most of my customers are small enough that they do not have requirements of the magnitude this article addresses, and the ones that are, are sending out their bigger jobs to in-house press plants, or over the web to print shops already. The "design on the fly" and ability to change things on the web, then submit to print, is pretty cool!

Imagine if this becomes the common model for Independent MFD or MFP and MPS business people. It will be interesting to see if this model gets some discussion at their upcoming conference.

The rest of this post is just my evolving thought model to try to clarify how PSPs and Vendors can act in a changing environment.

'Printernet publishing'
The sustainable advantage is that while publishing on the web is cheap and easy, publishing in print requires printers. A printer can be a machine or a machine + intelligence. The particular kind of intelligence depends on the length of the run and the print product being produced. (see the quote above).

A "printernet" would create a new medium. This new medium would allow global print manufacture and distribution of almost any quantity of Print product, in a couple of days. Consider the daily capacity of PSPs and multiply by the number of PSPs. Consider also the low carbon footprint required.

'Printernet publishing' would enable message makers in government, corporate, education, health to communicate with everyone fast enough to make a difference.

This is not a new idea. It's just applying common sense at a global scale. It's always been, and will always be, about the right information in the right form at the right time for the right person.

More on MSM being hosed and the opportunity for the Printernet

Recent conversations at the top of the various pyramids are usually complicated because no one wants to face the fact that their power is disappearing.

Here's how it plays out for publishers.

From William F. Aicher:
. . . I want to discuss a bit the bigger point the publishing industry doesn’t seem to be getting - they no longer hold the keys to the kingdom.

For hundreds of years now, the barrier to entry to create a written work that can easily be duplicated and made available to the masses has relied upon a very closed system, with a very high cost of entry. During those times logistical issues greatly limited the amount of content that could be created (how many printing presses exist, for example) or how many books could really be sold (how many bookstores could exist, and how much shelf space was available). So it was extraordinarily important for any publisher to make very discriminate decisions as to what books they would publish and ultimately attempt to get onto a store’s shelf. During this time they were the tastemakers and ultimately responsible for the continued desire for people to want to consume the written word."

The printernet opportunity
Publishing on the web is now easy. Publishing in the real world is still hard. The Printernet can make it easy. Every company that can build links to the printernet will be in a nice sustainable low margin/ huge margin business.

As Mosaic was to the Internet, so Clickable Print is to the Printernet

Assumptions:
1. Print and TV are the mass media.
2. The internet is to buy things, search and talk.
3. The business rules are buy, search, and talk for free and pay for stuff.
4. Print, t shirts, posters et al. are information rich stuff.
5. The printernet enables the speed and scale that can make them valuable.

Printernet
Massive parallel local/global print manufacturing .
At the MFP or CRD or PSP or a gezillion PSPS.

Mosiac
Easy access to the internet

Clickable print (Print + 2d Codes + PC cameras or Smart Phones)
Easy access to the printernet

Some use cases:
Clickable maps connected to OnStar or Sirius Radio.
Clickable TV guides to find just the right video at just the right time.
Clickable club cards and postcards to support viral marketing.
Clickable club cards, postcards and flyers to support political campaigns.
Clickable newspapers to replace high school textbooks.
Clickable labels in museums and art galleries to find out more.
Clickable supermarket shoppers to carry through the store.
Clickable menus to get the ingredients and the chain of production of the food.
Clickable production machines to get the carbon footprints.
Clickable manuals for doctors, plumbers and electricians.
Clickable drug labeling to monitor compliance.

And my personal favorites:
Clickable curriculum guides to get just the right video on the flat screen in the classroom and then the kids watching the video on their smartphones and then the family watching the video in the living room. And then talking about it.

Clickable ID's for High School kids to make it easy to send an SMS to mom when junior acts up. It will fix the "attendance problem" in about 2 weeks. It should fix the "stop acting like an asshole problem" in about a month.

Data points:
1. The new iPhone sold over a 1 million units in a couple of days.
2. Social marketing is marketing.
3. Whispernet + Amazon makes one button purchase of books easy.
4. Automobiles are connected to the Cloud.
5. Textbooks are disappearing from California.
6. The newspaper industry is coming back from the "end of the world."
7. HP TouchSmart is connected to HP Apps.
8. The global economic engine is moving to BRIC and G20.
9. The person who sells mobile phones at my Costco referring to his cell phone with a 2" by 5" keyboard said, "This never leaves my hand. I spent last weekend watching the Mets on the flat screen and Family Guy on my phone. It was the best vacation I've had in a long time. I used it type my resume.
10. A couple of my high school students used their cell phones to write the essays that appeared at the class wiki.
11. Barack Obama is number 6 on twitter with 1,573,800 followers as of this morning.

Likely data points:
1. Apple will release a big iPhone which will be the killer app tablet computer.
2. Newspapers will find a business model enabling commerce in addition to advertising.
3. Legacy video will be tagged for educational uses.
4. High school education will get much cheaper, faster and better.
5. Newspapers will publish versioned papers for communities of interest.

Maybe future data points:
1. Android, Apple OS ,MSFT will compete to be the OS of the mobile web.
2. Smartphones, netbooks and X+whispernet will be the access points to the web.
3. Thirty second commercials will be harnessed to help fix high school education.
4. Clickable newspapers will publish versioned papers for the communities of learners, starting with high school, then moving to everyone.

Data+Blabla Point: Canon makes a nice sale . . .and the Quick Printer and/or MPS is the energy that powers the Printernet

Canon has taken a big hit with the Ricoh Ikon thing. But they are most definitely still in the game.

Here's the Canon part:

Minuteman Press of Cambridge Adds the Canon imagePRESS C6000 and C6000VP to Their Fleet of Commercial Print Technology
@ Reuters: "LAKE SUCCESS, N.Y.--(Business Wire)-- Canon Business Solutions, Inc., a subsidiary of Canon U.S.A. and a leading provider of document imaging and office solutions, today announced that Minuteman Press of Cambridge, Massachusetts has installed the Canon imagePRESS C6000 and C6000VP digital presses to support the growing demand for short-run quality color output."

Here's the printernet part:

Minuteman Press in Cambridge.. centers its business on digitally based processes, partnerships and business models. A growing number of clients take advantage of Minuteman`s on-demand environment that connects their infrastructures with Minuteman`s, integrating digital workflows as well as e-procurement via the client's ERP system.

Here's the blablalbla part:

The printernet has three moving parts: The OEM (xerox, ricoh, heidelberg, etc.), the OPM/PSP (Sandy Alexander, Motheral Printing, etc.) and the VAR (printing sales people, independent and global MPS, etc.) Sometimes OPM and VAR are located in the same organizations (AlphaGraphics, Staples, other franchises and successful commercial printers.)

The printernet also has the UNF - the User Network Facilitator (Consolidated Graphics, Donnelly, the central office of the franchises, SaaS software) Sometimes there is a combination of OEM and UNF. For the globals, that's where the organic growth comes from. As soon as incentives are aligned, all the pieces come together and command-and-control management is no longer necessary.

My bet is that the franchises will turn out to be the energy that drives the whole thing for commercial print and that independent MPS will be the energy that drives the organization part. Exactly who does exactly what is dependent on local circumstances, DNA, and Darwinian evolution.

Take a second look at the description above of the Kwik Kopy in Cambridge and you should see what I'm trying to say.

What I think I learned this morning at Twitter about Printernet Publishing and getting to zero cost Professional Development.

I'm trying to figure out how to create a zero cost Professional Development product for High School Ed, first in the States, and then be able to scale world wide.

I hate the high cost of PD that is widely regarded as less than useless. While there are some offerings that make sense, most of them are ways to look like something is happening, without anything really happening.

It's a "busy, being busy" situation that gives the appearance of something useful. Meanwhile, our school systems are under sever strain.

My hypothesis is the #clickableprint( print + Smart #QR) that is #printernet published could solve the Professional Development problem while giving our Print industry a large previously un addressed market. It could add defensible value to MPS offerings and create a steady stream of work for PSPs.

At any rate, I'm starting to use twitter to do my research and think through how this might work.

An edited selection of this morning's tweets from ToughLoveforX, follow:

@kokh Unfortunately, I never learned to read Russian. But , consider #printernet published #clickableprint. Xerox in Russia would love it.
about 1 hour ago from web

RT @VOQS great nwslter system ! http://bit.ly/28Zmrr Me: RSS to Email nwslter to Print nwslter to #Clickableprint newsletter. ya think?
about 1 hour ago from web

Sustainable Communications at The Hannover Consultancy (UK) http://bit.ly/1L67g Me: sustainable ed? zero cost Profl. Dev? education = HR.
about 1 hour ago from web

Newspaper Archives http://bit.ly/4bQ79x in #clickableprint #printernet published=1 part of free Professional Development for HS #education.
16 minutes ago from web

Newspaper Archives has the right tools for teachers. http://bit.ly/3WdBcD But teachers don't want PDF. They want paper to hand out.
12 minutes ago from web

Textbooks, the printernet and the end of bullshit

I did a post a couple of days ago and got this comment from BobH

Great stuff and right to the point. I called the good folks at PBWicki who insist their system is not meant to replace textbooks. Why not???? It's great to augment materials and be a place to share with your classmates/associates/organization, add web & other content, etc, etc. A customized living textbook, printed on-demand, for pennies on the dollar. What's stopping it?

Then I said,

What's stopping it is the fact that folks like Oce, Xerox and InfoPrint are focused at the top of the pyramid. It's just in their DNA.

So...they look at the education space. They "see" the textbook companies have the "content". They "see" the only way to do is to come in from the top of the pyramid. Based on what they "see," they think it means a gezillion meetings with publishers and education administrators....

Most of those meetings are power dances, not getting things done. So, they stay away.

Professor Henry Frankfurt of Princeton University says, "The "bullshitter" does not care about the truth and is only seeking to impress." Real meetings can be useful. Power dance meetings are classic examples of time wasting bullshit in action.

Meanwhile over at PR Communications there is a discussion about the nature of Public Relations. In the context of that conversation I said,

I think that points to PR people as message managers, not message controllers. It also points to a redefinition of PR.

Once the web made it very easy to compare and contrast, it became very clear that a large percentage of "journalism" is reprinting PR releases with a little gloss. In a value chain, it only makes sense. Journalists do not have the time to be experts at everything. They have the choice of a scanning the horizon or staying focused on a small area.

The emergence of beat reporting is a decision to focus on a small area and become an expert. The PR person by the nature of the job is focused on one area, their client. So the job becomes scanning the organization's information, and recombining unnoticed events to craft a story that someone will want to hear or read.

I think it's most clear in the recent Presidential campaign. Hillary's people thought they could control the news cycle. Obama's people understood that the only thing that has a chance of working is to keep telling the truth and building your fan base.

My bet is that Obama's team listened very closely to what people were saying. Not to follow it or pander to it or control it.

They listened carefully to get the the feedback to better understand how to more effectively tell the truth.

The opportunity for printernet publishing
The fact is that if you want to get your signal to break through the noise, the best media is Print. The internet just makes the signal v noise worse by radically increasing the noise. The problem, until the printernet, is that Print does not have the scale or the response time.

Textbooks with IP trapped content and value chain production can not respond fast enough nor be up to date have become too inefficient for learning. "Improving" them is only paving over cowpaths. The idea that they will be replaced by individualized computer instruction is good, but again misses the enabling factor. The advantage of Print is that it isolates signal from noise and captures that signal on Paper in a permanent form that can be considered, not read, viewed, scanned or consumed.

Without consideration and reflection learning is impossible.

Once printernet publishing becomes organized, Print is liberated from the disadvantages of the recent past. Millions of print products could be manufactured and delivered overnight to most urban areas on the planet, without getting close to straining capacity.

Much more important is that 30 copies could be delivered to a classroom, when teachable moments are likely to occur with just the right content in just right form at just the right time.

"Printernet" was coined at PacPrint 09 in Australia

I started a conversation about the printernet over at Digital Nirvana. Turns out I did not coin the word. Some marketing professional at PacPrint 09 did. From the comments:

1. Andy McCourt Says:
   March 25th, 2009 at 8:34 pm edit

   Michael,
   See: http://www.pacprint.com.au/
   Printernet is one of the themes of this upcoming show, although more in a marketing sense than the apps you describe.
   I am one who believes that the contextualisation - on both personal and interest group levels - of information in a bound printed product is set to be one of the next big things. If that’s Printernet then yes, it’s useful.

2. mjosefowicz Says:
   March 26th, 2009 at 4:36 am edit

   Andy-
   And I thought I coined the term. lol. Just goes to show that there are no new ideas, just different implementations in different places! If someone in Australia thought it was a good word, and I thought it was a good word here in New York. It might actually be a good word.

   At any rate, my sense is that if the term is used not merely for marketing, but as a guide for strategy it works. It means that local printers become eager to make connections, instead of trying to go it alone. It means that the vendors see that they are part of much greater media ecosystem that implies they can’t go it alone.

   With the coming to market of mass customization technology, it means the beginning of the end of one size fits all Print. The under appreciated opportunity is the ability of Print to communicate with groups of people, with micro versioning, instead of focusing on 1 to 1 in the service of direct mail on steroids.

   I’m seeing:

   Relevant content printed and distributed by local PSP’s as bi monthly “stay in front of the customer” newsletter? newspaper? poster? And every once in a while a book?

   It could be:
   Corporate communication to stockholders directly that by passes the “busyness press.”. Or the latest print stories from Australia, India or Europe. Or industry specific content - marketing? advertising? education? etc etc

   Or the good news about people on the ground with innovative solutions, as one finds in the Christian Science Monitor.
   http://features.csmonitor.com/innovation/

I didn't say there what I think is the most interesting opportunity of all, replacing textbooks and supplementals with WikiBooks, WikiNewspapers, and posters that are the right information in the right form at the right time for bottom of the pyramid high school students, either in school, drop outs from school or incarcerated.

If the question is peace and sustainability, the answer is education.