b.cognosco
Most Popular
- Historical Yearly Average Gasoline Prices
- Outlook 2003 Message-ID Insanity
- Real-time Sand Animations
- Adobe Acrobat 7
- Adobe Announces Name Change and New Product
- Largest Technology Boondoggle in Public Education History
- Yahoo! Buys del.icio.us
- Skype - Disruptive, Not Compelling
- Aluminum Christmas Tree Museum
- Network Printing Hell and windoze XP
Book Reviews
Recently
Thursday, May 12, 2005
More Consolidation in Printing Industry
Big, big news in the printing industry...
Quebecor World To Sell Commercial Unit
(05/11/2005)Quebecor World announced yesterday that it intends to sell its North American commercial printing division, which operates 10 plants and generates revenues of $250 million.
The company says its financial performance was hampered by the unit. Quebecor World saw its Q1 profits chopped in half, reporting Q1 net income of $16.3 million compared to $35.8 million in Q1 2004.
"We have determined this business [the commercial group] to be non-core and are currently pursuing exclusive negotiations to sell this business and similar facilities in Canada," said Pierre Karl Peladeau, Quebecor World's president and CEO. The company also has started to move its short-run book printing offshore to attract publishers outsourcing work to Asia. Work and assets are moving to four of its plants Latin American.
QW is one of the big four North American printing companies and one of the strongest in magazine and book printing. The fact they could not make any money in commercial print here, and are moving their book work offshore says a lot about the state of this lagging industry, and the intense pressure starting to appear from AsiaPacific.
Terry Frazier at 4:00 PM
| Permanent Link
| Trackback URL | Categories: Business & Finance, Future of Print
Monday, April 4, 2005
The Spy That PDF'd Me
It was only a matter of time before all the structured, linked, DRM’d functions of the proprietary PDF format were tied back into a low-cost, low-burden, viral tracking mechanism. It seems likely PDFzone author is right to suggest this is just the beginning of a movement to make PDFs increasingly invasive. PDF is a great tool when used properly, but look for this to become a real issue and a battle cry for the anti-PDF crowd. Be interesting to see what, if anything, Adobe does with this.
Me? I dunno. I’m not sure I’d buy a PDF that required me to be connected to open it. Rather defeats the purpose, IMO. But it’s likely most sellers won’t disclose that little tidbit before the sale. Found via Privacy Digest. Read the whole thing at PDFzone.
PDF Tracking On the Way
PDF Tracking On the Way. (el)Capitan.Nick writes "PDFzone reports that the company Remote Approach has launched a service to track the movement of PDF documents with its tool Map-Bot. The purpose of this service is to allow PDF publishers the ability to measure their audience, as web publishers can already. Though personal information is not gathered from machines, IP addresses are. PDFs can require users to be connected to the Internet in order to read them, and every person you email the PDF to is subject to the service. As PDFzone's opinion article states, while 'the chances of running into a Remote Approach PDF right now -- and in the near future -- are pretty remote ... the potential for the technology to tarnish PDF's image [of security] is staggering.'" [Slashdot: Your Rights Online]
Terry Frazier at 2:30 PM
| Permanent Link
| Trackback URL | Categories: Future of Print, Security, Technology
Wednesday, December 15, 2004
Google Print Program
Yesterday Google announced it has struck a deal with several major university libraries. According to this DMNews article the deal covers scanning and digitizing more than 15 million books and documents from Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, the University of Oxford and the New York Public Library. Yesterday's Talk of the Nation on NPR featured Michael Keller of Stanford and Brewster Kahle in a great discussion of this development. The library program is part of Google's larger Google Print program, which offers services to major publishers as well as libraries.In today's WSJ there is an article on Random House looking to begin selling its books online, direct to consumers. This is a big step for publishers and, as the article notes, a step being considered to fight the growing power of the mega-retailers. But if we consider the digitization of books via Google in context with this, it potentially begins to change the way people locate and buy books.
For years I've felt the book retailers were becoming the new libraries -- they have books on display, reading areas, and snack bars to keep readers comfortable. But they rarely carry anything more than 12-18 months old. What if libraries became the new booksellers? Not literally, but libraries will keep books available for years, and if the excerpts are all available online and can be ordered easily via the publisher there is less and less need for the retail store.
I need to think about this more but it seems to me that these two developments are related, and together they are more important than either taken individually.
Terry Frazier at 11:41 PM
| Permanent Link
| Trackback URL | Categories: Books, Business & Finance, Future of Print, Strategy
Syndication
Contact
Presence
This Page was last updated: Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:06:57 GMT
