A month ago I, like many others, got and iPad. One thing that has really interested me is people complaining about not being able to print. Leading to dozens of iPad apps that allow you to print documents from the iPad via many different methods.
I have none of these apps and probably won’t buy any, the simple fact is that I am 90% paperless in both work and personal facets. So I asked myself, is printing still relevant. With email and signed PDFs, do we really need to print things, and when we do, does it really matter?
(Let’s put aside photo printing, as we all do it and we know just how important high quality is.) I think that now more than ever printing is very important.
Not so much in the sense that we desperately need printouts in order to survive in today’s world. The opposite is actually true, we truly can get by without paper these days – though most choose not to. It is for this very reason that printing is so important.
We need to change the way we think about printouts. Printing should be the new marketing materials that we use. Each printout should be high quality with thought put into it.
We no longer print for portability, we print to impress.