We in the printiverse owe the splendidly-monikored Vint Cerf a debt of gratitude.

It’s all very well for us to bang on about the fact that print is a powerful medium, with many special qualities that set it apart from digital media.

To name but a few: special formats, range of substrates, colours, textures and finishes.

And then there’s the not-so-small matter of longevity. A 100-year-old-book can still function perfectly, no batteries or power supply required. Whereas, typically, a ten year old computer gadget does not.

But we would say that, wouldn’t we.  

Cerf, who is vice-president and chief internet evangelist at a little company called Google, is tremendously well-known in the tech sphere. He is even described as [one of the] fathers of the internet.

Well, he’s the daddy here this week, as he has also done a quite brilliant marketing job for print.

Cerf’s recent pronouncements about so-called ‘digital decay’ have struck a chord. Society in general is in danger of losing all sorts of valuable information due to bit rot.

Here in print we know something about this, just think of the obsolete mass storage devices in our relatively recent past, such as Megashuttles, Syquest and Jaz drives. Never mind all those old software programs and proprietary systems we used to use.

While Cerf called for a sort of “digital vellum” to preserve all this digital content, he also told The Guardian: “If there are photos you really care about, print them out.”

Hoorah! Now we really can say that VIIP (very important internet person) Vint understands the power of print.

Which gives us all something to shout about.