Population Genetics Lab

Kill iPad the printers?

When considering the current debate in the communications market on the sense and nonsense of an iPad or a small, mobile touch PC, I notice that a lot of digital content and the possibilities for the future of publishing or authors is spoken, but little about the future of print - especially large printing.

If the trend in the newspaper and magazine industry continued in the direction of lower requirements and in addition iPad is a trend towards digital content on a medium is added as a reading, this is already a serious blow to the employees in the affected printers. But it can certainly contribute a further trend to decline: the current environmental debate, which concerns the protection of resources and prevent environmental pollution. These issues are discussed in my opinion, quite rightly in order to temporarily quality print products.

Even though I now can not prove with numbers, the CO2 footprint of a digital magazine that is loaded onto a iPad, far almost certainly below that of a magazine from the kiosk located. When I think about me, what would be dropped so everything from environmental factors that influence:

1. raw material procurement for paper
2. production of the paper (possibly by recycling)
3. transport to print
4. procurement of raw materials for inks
5. production of printing inks
6. Transport for printing
7. production of printed magazines in fixed edition
8. transport to customers (Kiosk)
9. return of the unsold books
10. recycling of unsold books

this high energy and raw material consumption (and here are missing probably a few more detailed phases) are the digital equivalent of the device, server and download energy expenditures over - which, in use of renewable power generation , should leave a smaller CO2 footprint.

digital content / media from a customer perspective would thus not only convenient in the procurement, but also environmentally friendlier than their analog counterparts ... if there is not an even faster rethinking among consumers, as feared by the media industry.

In a future, say Let's 2020, could the printer and print out a similar struggle, as has been done decades ago, the miners and coal mines. A struggle against a changing world.

Over the centuries, many have changed jobs or have lost their meaning. Perhaps this is now blooming and the guild of printers that way by the growing use of digital media a new focus. For the suppliers are the same.

Surely it would make sense now to think about such a change and not with closed eyes in the meaning and unemployment to run. Meanwhile, the bad examples an ignorant management of change, as they were seen in the music and media industry and are leading to new approaches to processes of change.

This is again just a thought experiment in the "Communications 2020" discussion which I have, throw in the project, but perhaps one with economic and social importance ...