04 May 2009 | Uncategorized | bob

The web’s gone 2.0, your floppy drive has been replaced with a DVD burner, and your monitor has gone from a big clunky box to svelte elegance. But what about your printer? What new tricks can we expect from that old dog in the near future? While the business of staining paper with meaningful symbols and art is thousands of years old, there are still some neat new ideas brewing for our future.

Among the companies imagining what that future might look like is Hewlett-Packard. Vyomesh Joshi, head of HP’s Imaging and Printing Group, recently gave a few hints as to where that company is headed. It’s less radically transforming printers themselves and more about giving you new and more compelling reasons to use them. “We don’t want to be thinking about a printer attached to a PC as the opportunity,” he said. Instead, HP is focusing more on how you use that printer.

In alliance with social media sites, HP wants to give you a one-button solution to do fun things with your printer, such as print out your friends’ pictures, or create posters or books without having to cut-and-paste or launch additional programs. Taking your social media experience out into the non-digital world seems like a winning idea, but only time can tell if it will catch on.

And speaking of books, book seller Blackwell brings us the Espresso Book Machine, which prints and binds books at the blazing speed of 105 pages per minute. This means it can print out most paperbacks in less than five minutes. The Espresso Book Machine is an industrial-sized printer, so you won’t be plopping it on your desk anytime soon. The idea is that people looking for out-of-print or hard to find books can order it at the machine and pick it up a few minutes later. Writers can also bring their own work on a CD and have it turned into a professionally bound paperback. Blackwell reports that the cost of these books will be about the same as if they were in stock.

While the Espresso Book Machine takes advantage of some cutting-edge technology, the emphasis again is clearly on taking printing beyond single-sided loose pages of text. The two-pronged strategy aims to give you more compelling reasons to create physical artifacts from your digital life while at the same time making it easier to do. If these forward-thinking companies are correct, the Digital Age won’t kill print, but co opt it, turning the printed page into a bridge between the physical world and our online lives.

Photo credit: Mess of Pottage