The biggest part of conventional printing is publication printing, covering almost 50percent of the total market of printed products. Common for publication printing is that the publishers are depending on that the consumer pays for every single copy. The publisher has to find the most cost effective way to get as many copies as possible sold to the public.
In printed publications direct printing and material costs generally represent some 10 to 20 percent of the total costs of the product. Depending on how the product is distributed, the distribution costs can be even higher than the printing costs. In the future it will be possible to deliver books, and later also full color magazines, as digital data that can be loaded to an electronic screen, looking like a book or magazine. At least single color text books will achieve the same quality as printed text. For both publisher and consumer this will be a very significant way to produce text information. Full color pictures are still more difficult as they need very big data capacity. In a quite near future this will probably also be solved.
For the publisher this means that the main problem will be to charge the customer for the publications. This will be solved on internet, CD-ROM and similar digital media. One problem that will remain is that the digital publications are very easy to copy, and even if copying is made more difficult it will be very difficult to prevent pirate copies from entering the market.
