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Print-on-demand has revolutionized the publishing industry.
It is still a bit more costly to print digitally rather than via offset press, but the economics of printing only what you need or sell, rather than have over 30% of the printed books returned to the publisher far outweighs the added costs.
The rate at which technology impacts an industry is startling, with publishing just one example.
I saw this first hand years ago when I worked in the financial services industry. The firm invested heavily in new microfiche printing equipment. Microfiche is photographic film imprinted with very small images of data, text and graphics. It used to be the standard means of storing and recalling massive amounts of information, saving space over paper. To view this microscopic data, one needed a special reader which enlarged the images by projecting them onto a screen the size of a standard computer display.
The firm I worked for spent $4 million on new printers just as digital scanning was becoming more affordable. In order to recover the cost of these printers, they had to charge the users more money, and that led to a change in behavior. Departments stopped using microfiche, electing instead to scan their own documents and read them on their computers.
The lesson here applies across all industries for all types of technology, but it is not limited to technological changes. We are equally blessed and cursed to live in a time when ideas can be quickly converted into reality. In less than a lifetime, we evolved from printing on massive presses using photographic plates to "printing" 3-D plastic and ceramic models from computer-generated graphics.
Today, lasers capture all the dimensions of a patient's mouth and feed that data to software that aids the digital dentist in creating a crown that fits perfectly, and is produced in one day!
With so much changing so rapidly, investing in the right technology or process at the right time is critical to survival of any business.
It is easy to see why many business and practice owners adopt a wait-and-see attitude, remaining frozen in indecision over the right course to take.
This is a lot bigger than "should I print or not"? But the example is a good one. Choosing a strategy that makes the most practical and economic sense means knowing how and when to deliver our products and services as well as to whom.
Yes, we need to know our target market, but we also need to pay attention to how that target market navigates the world of choices at its disposal. We certainly don't want to find ourselves with expensive outdated equipment or processes and no way to recover the costs.