Paper Companies Seek To Turn Over New Leaf
If you would have told most people 25 years ago that in the not-so-distant future they would be able to file their taxes without putting a pen to paper, they would have thought you were crazy. But the Internet celebrated its 25th birthday just earlier this month, and with less than a month left in tax season, many of us are going paperless and filing our taxes online. Not only that, but people and corporations are doing plenty of other things without paper that used to require large volumes of it. Email, taxes, reading the news, annual returns: all can be taken care of without a single sheet of paper.
This has left paper companies in a bind, as demand for paper fell sharply with the rise of the computer and the Internet. However, new innovations are bringing paper companies back out of the red, and turning paper from a commodity into a keepsake, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Mohawk Paper, for example, took a gamble by investing heavily in the high-quality stationary market. While the Internet may have brought down the demand for more utilitarian uses of paper, it has increased the demand for more creative and design oriented uses that require higher quality and non-standard sized paper. For example, personalized stationary, greeting, and holiday cards which can be designed online with user-submitted photos. Mohawk, which was already in possession of a machine that cut non-standard sized paper, bought several high quality stationary firms and made a bet that the digital printing industry would take off. It did. According to the Journal, “In 1998 sales of paper to digital companies comprised $10 million in revenue, Mohawk officials said. In 2012, sales to digital customers reached $100 million in sales, about 40% of company revenue.”
Advantage Book Binding has been in the book binding business since 1985, when we were founded on the principle “we do a quality book on time.” Since then we’ve seen plenty of changes both in and out of the industry. While some have sounded the death knell for books and other physical media, we believe that the fact that we continue to be an industry leader into the 21st century is a testament not only to our longevity as a company but to that of our craft. We think it’s important to keep books and physical media on the shelves, which is why we dedicate ourselves to providing you with the highest quality book binding and post press services available.
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Source
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304703804579385470794476470
