When I saw the story about new online print auction site Pro-X, I thought “this is going to generate some interesting comments”. And so it has proved. Suffice to say the venture has not exactly been welcomed with open arms. Whenever print auction sites are mentioned my thoughts are transported back to the year 2000 and the “dotcom Drupa”, when we were awash with new ventures promising to transform the way print was bought and sold, for a fee. The investments and valuations were huge, the returns were not. Remember 58k, Ctrlprint, PrintMountain and many others of this ilk. Where are they now? If anything, the environment for a print auction site is way more hostile today than it was more than a decade ago. Those printers that remain in business are older and wiser. And many printers have learned the painful way that being pushed down the supply chain to a price-based commodity is not a nice place to be unless one’s business is specifically set up to trade on that basis. If Pro-X has come up with a model that will result in happy punters AND printers then good luck to them. Time will tell.