The Verdigris blog by Laurel Brunner
As ISO standards writers, it’s always interesting to us to find that lists of industrial sectors rarely include printing. The British Standards Institute (BSI) for instance, boasts of standards for a range of categories but printing is not identified as one. Finding standards such as the ISO 12647 series for process control on the BSI website is almost impossible, even if you know what you are looking for. ISO calls TC130, its committee responsible for printing and publishing standards, Graphic technology. It’s as if the printing and publishing communities are invisible and somehow subsumed into other activities, like media or manufacturing. If you dig deep enough you can sometimes find them buried in these classifications.
Being invisible however suggests that the printing and publishing sectors, acknowledged or not, cuts across all of the other industrial sectors; it doesn’t merit its own label because it is somehow intrinsic to all the others. We don’t much think about it, but publishing is every company’s second business, and even if a company doesn’t have a website they surely have business cards and brochures. Pretty much all organisations publish profiles about their activities and product data and most use a website to sell their wares or promote their services. We’re all publishers one way or another.
Despite the undeserved reputation printing has for being a polluter, few businesses can do without the printed word, despite our embrace of all things online. Even if it is just for a digital display or signage or leaflets we need the printed word to convey information and ideas. And modern digital production technologies have made this wonderful world of universal communications accessible to consumers, as well as business and governments. Families routinely get their relatives printed gifts ranging from picture books and calendars, to coasters and tee-shirts. Printing and publishing is what all of us do and yet, standards bodies do not recognise the sectors as independent, worthy of their own category in standards lists.
This is a hugely disturbing oversight because printing and publishing together help shape our understanding of the world. The alarming misinformation so easily propagated online and the confusion about how to regulate social media posts reflect a misappreciation of the nature of the publishing process and its societal role. Printing and publishing are universal, like energy or clothing. Both of these are recognised with their own category, and yet the best we get as a sector is a reference as subset of media and communications. Commercial print, book, newspaper and magazine printing, are not identified. Only packaging has its own category. It is ironic that packaging is the only form of print that can have no digital equivalent. Perhaps that is part of the problem.
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This article was produced by the Verdigris Project, an industry initiative intended to raise awareness of print’s positive environmental impact. This weekly commentary helps printing companies keep up to date with environmental standards, and how environmentally friendly business management can help improve their bottom lines. Verdigris is supported by the following companies: Agfa Graphics, EFI, Fespa, Fujifilm, HP, Kodak, Miraclon, RicohSplash PR, Unity Publishing and Xeikon.
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