A couple of recent events have caused me to consider, once again, the potentially problematic nature of large print contracts.

This week we learned that Asda has canned its 3m run, 400pp-plus Asda Direct catalogue. That's quite a chunk of print work. Meanwhile, in the world of publishing something of a hokey cokey is going on at BSkyB. Just over a year ago I was contemplating the print production impact when this company - notable as producing the UK's top three customer magazines by circulation - decided to switch frequency from 12 issues a year to ten, as BSkyB did with four of its titles. In a stroke it culled 32m magazines annually.

Now it transpires that it has decided to revert to 12 issues again for the renamed Sky Magazine, while Sky Movies and Sky Sports will only be published bi-monthly. Are you keeping up with all this? And from standardising the format of all its mags (an understandable paper- and cost-saving move) Movies and Sports will now be a larger trim size. Confused? I imagine there's fun and games on the planning board at Prinovis, which prints all of the above mentioned, as a result of all this.

The customer is always right, and all that. But never has a world involving multiple, smaller jobs from many clients looked so appealing.