Ten Years of Commercial Printing Process Shifts
Earlier this year, the Commerce Department issued its report Annual Survey of Manufactures. It is
intended to provide industry data for the years where there is no Economic
Census. The Census is conducted every five years and concerns years ending in
-2 or -7. The 2007 Census is woefully out of date, probably more than any other
Census in my lifetime, with the great volatility of the financial crisis on top
of all of the technological changes since that year. Social media had barely
started in 2007, and the broad adoption of tablets and smartphones were
basically just ideas understood by computer geeks and early adopters. The
2011 ASM is probably the last
time we will see any detailed reporting about our industry from the Commerce
Department. Because printing’s share of GDP has decreased so much, the Commerce
Department will not expend its resources to collect detailed data about us, and
reallocates its efforts elsewhere.
