Printing Industry News Digest April 16, 2011

Welcome to Printing Industry News Digest (PIND) issue 48, the summary of major news stories from the printing, packaging, digital and communication sectors. Welcome to the latest edition of PIND, incorporating brief summaries and links to the week’s key news stories so that you can look up that all important detail.

Paywalls and publishing: we take a look at the latest news and views. It would certainly seem too early to make too many assumptions about the New York Times and its paywall activity, though the guys at Mashable seem keen to make some early comment – a 99 cents offer is not going to give totally accurate numbers, but visitor figures are certainly down already.

Paywalls should certainly have an effect on a publications social media strategy. Mashable again makes some comment on this topic. Taking a wider view, the team at Gigacom present some interesting numbers on how the market is changing for newspapers with the growing adoption of the smartphone and the tablet computer.

Scarily, however, the Guardian offers us some numbers detailing what tablets are being used for and games top the list, following by browser searching and emailing. Another similar offering tells us 29 statistics of how iPad is changing our lives.

Our printing slant this week focuses on a very neat little write-up that offers a good guide to typography, including definitions of many of those bits of terminology that designers and pre-press folk use on a regular basis. It’s a handy guide to have to hand if you are new the world of ligatures, ampersands and letter spacing.

We’ve written quite a bit about the wonders of QR codes and how they might help to link the worlds of print and the internet. Well, already the world is moving forward. This latest offering from Aurasma details a forthcoming app that will be able to link any regularly printed item to a web site. OK, as is pointed out in the some of the comments re this story, the idea is embryonic t this point, but you can see where it is going.

Mashable offers something for computer users looking for productive PC solutions. A selection of desktop apps are offered here to speed up your day-to-day working life.

If you are a home-based worker, TNW offers seven top tips to help you be more productive, including goal setting. It also offers a focus on that wonderful saying about being busy not equating to being effective: basically, any fool can be busy; you have to use the time effectively to be productive!

Finally, do keep checking back to see what will be featured in our next edition, PIND 49. Details of new stories will be added to this link during the course of the week.

PIND048

Want to read issue 47? Click Here!