Today's blog comes to you from the PPA's annual conference, where the topic is inspiration and innovation in publishing.

Naturally iPads and tablet devices loom large, and apparently we can expect to see a further 16 such gizmos coming to market over the next 12 months or so. Gulp.

Amid all the digital hubbub it was, however, encouraging to hear IPC Media chief executive Evelyn Webster state that printed magazines are still a source of "good, strong opportunities" for the company.

And a survey of international magazine publishers by the Innovation International Media Consulting Group reveals that plenty of publishers are doing clever things with their printed products - in fact the bulk of innovations featured were physical (or involved actual magazines interacting with digital) rather than solely digital.

For example, I am loving the sound of Dutch magazine Flow, which uses multiple paper types in each edition and contains items such as bookmarks, postcards, and mini-books - essentially it's a magazine inspired by the fact that plenty of people (and I'm one of them) will pay a lot of money for a lovely notebook, so why not produce a similarly covetable magazine? Excellent stuff.

The notion of paper made from stone certainly grabbed the audience's attention, causing me to re-read my Print Geek blog from Drupa 2008 where I stumbled across a substrate of this type. A luxury resort and spa mag in the States is using a variant of this "paper", C-Stone Paper, for its magazine (though I'm finding its "save the trees" messaging irritating). One of the benefits being you can read it in the sauna without the mag turning to papier mâché.

Anyhow, that's it for now, best get back to the action. Amusingly I had trouble logging on to the wireless network at the venue earlier, and a passing waiter said: "It's because they're using iPads in there, they take up all the connectivity."

Whether that's true or not I don't know, but it did make me laugh.