It's a fact that some high-profile items of what could be described as 'traditional' print are in decline, newspapers being the obvious and most-cited example.
Elsewhere, mass market untargeted direct mail is also on the wane and the jury is still out on whether the explosion in e-book consumption will lead to a steep decline in printed book sales.
However, in other areas I can see all sorts of new print being generated, and I'm not sure the printed materials consumption measurement tools developed in the last century are capturing the full extent of the printed world now we're in the 21st.
An example that springs to mind is Angry Birds, the hugely successful and addictive game that's the number one paid-for app in pretty much every country you can think of. It has topped 350m downloads worldwide.
The game has spawned its own range of merchandise; I read recently that a million Angry Birds t-shirts are being sold every month. That's a lot of t-shirts. The brand also has a 96pp colour cookery book (96pp on eggs, what would Delia make of it?), school stationery sets, fridge magnets and other paraphernalia.
On a similar but smaller scale, we have a local example here on the small island in the shape of Simon's Cat, a hugely popular series of animations that started out on YouTube and has now resulted in a book, a range of greetings cards and goodness knows what else. In fact, I've just looked at the Simon's Cat website (warning: the animations are extremely addictive) and I see they are promoting a new range of t-shirts and limited edition art prints.
Someone, somewhere, is printing all of this stuff. The online/digital world is generating a lot of new print.
