Drupa snooper – The Apple-less, Adobe-less, Quark-less drupa

Let’s be totally honest with ourselves. The printing industry has had a thirty-five year, six-drupa, love-hate relationship with the ‘gang of three’ (four if you count Aldus, which was swallowed up by Adobe), who revolutionized prepress, typesetting and design.

Some of us were dragged kicking and screaming from our Linotypes, Monotypes, Compugraphics and Bertholds. Andy McCourt (pictured) has found that many designers of a certain age still have an Agfa or Screen vertical camera gathering dust in a corner with a Kluge artwork waxer and boxes of CopyRapid under the dustsheet.

It was all about DTP. The industry’s fraught relationship with Apple, Adobe and Quark became strained when skilled tradespeople saw their livelihoods disappear into funny little computer boxes that one moment were driving laser printers, the next driving film imagesetters, then direct-to-plate setters and today streaming the page data straight into digital presses. Of course, the Homer Simpson - phobes whose motto was ‘Carpe Diem’ (seize the day and not just the doughnuts), adopted DTP and Postscript with relish and lived to fight on.

As the ‘gang of three’ became more embedded into the printing industry, we expected them to behave much like our traditional suppliers; scrambling for our business, worshipping at the Temple of Print; grateful for the opportunity. Instead we got draconian EULAs; outrageous double-dip license fees, bully-boy litigation tactics, incompetent or forcibly extortionate upgrades; or none at all, and an overall attitude of ‘we don’t really care about the printing and design industry but you have to pay for our stuff, so like it or lump it.’ Sure there was illegal piracy but the graphical software kings themselves sometimes buccaneered their way across the Main, in trying to get double, triple, even quadruple license fees just for making film or plates from files of designers who had already paid in full for their fonts and software.

Of course, our industry owes a debt of gratitude to Apple, Adobe, Quark and those who rode on their coat-tails, for dragging us into the IT era; it was a change that had to come, but the cultures have never been totally fused because printers think it’s the gang of three’s mission to put them out of business whilst reaping profit from print’s entertaining, but eventually fatal, danse macabre; or in more-to-the-point German: Totentanz. The dance of death.

Conversely, the gang of three seems to view the printing industry as a community of mammoth-hunting cave dwellers with very poor cyber-manners. Or, I think they may even not think about us much at all: “Oh, the printing industry; yes I do recall it...haha-haha.”

USE OUR SOFTWARE, WE OWN THE OUTPUT???

Evidence of this erupted in January when Apple released its EULA (End User Licence Agreement), for its new iBooks Author programme. Reacting to clauses that apparently gave ownership of and rights to an author’s writings to Apple Inc. if written using its software, IT author and former managing editor of the US PC World, Ed Bott called it a: ‘mind-bogglingly greedy and evil license agreement.’

Take a deep breath, what he meant was that if you write a book or training manual using Apple’s iBooks (read iTunes for books); Apple is entitled to a big cut of any profits you make by whatever means from your creativity. In other words, Apple’s rights extend not just to its software, but to the OUTPUT from its software. Think of taking a great shot on your digital camera, tweaking it in Photoshop and then Adobe claiming all rights to the image (which they don’t). Or Microsoft claiming rights to this very article, keyed in with MS Word (which they also don’t.)

The outrage of Bott and other IT luminaries in the US must have hit home because in February, Apple released version 1.0.1 of iBooks Author – same software, new EULA. The watered-down version does not assert Apple’s rights to your work if exported in another format such as PDF, ASCII text etc; but does retain them if you stick with the .ibooks format. So, Apple’s lawyers listened and amended the EULA; good, but does this not give an insight into the mindset of those who do not appreciate the freedom, universality, beauty and democracy of the printed word?

BACK TO THE MESSE

Back at drupa 2012. As of today there is no Apple, Adobe or Quark exhibit. The triumvirate that virtually controls all creative input to what is eventually committed to ink-on-substrate, is absent from the field, at least under their own pennants.

Of course, drupa will be overflowing with Macs and PCs running Adobe and Quark and one of the hot ticket items is sure to be software that re-publishes InDesign pages for iPads, such as Twixl Publisher from the aquatically-named Four Pees company of Ghent, Belgium – represented in Australia by Yves Roussange’s business. My view is that every print media business should offer re-purposing of data to iPads and other interactive pad-type viewers.

Nevertheless, the apparent ignoring of drupa by Apple, Adobe (who did exhibit at Ipex 2010) and Quark – unless they book space late with only 71 days to go – is indicative not just of their relegation of print media to a ‘niche’ market where resellers can sort it out, but perhaps also our own shortcomings about inventing a new relevance for our industry. This may seem anachronistic for a global industry valued at around $800 billion (source: PIRA International), but it is a weight we have been burdened with.

That drupa is forging ahead and looking for ways to define this new relevance for print and allied media is not in question – there are over 120 software companies exhibiting, the drupa Cube technology forum area and many of the largest stands are global IT giants such as HP, Xerox, Ricoh and Canon. One can’t help wondering, though, if the CEOs of Apple, Adobe and Quark (Tim Cook, Shantanu Narayana and Ray Schiavone respectfully), were to visit the halls of drupa in May, they might think: “Hey, this show attracts more people than CeBIT and is buzzing with activity – why aren’t we a direct part of it?”

Why not indeed.

Drupa is the world’s largest trade fair dedicated to the printing and allied graphic media industries. Held every 4 years, it opens on May 3rd at the Messe Düsseldorf, Germany and closes on May 16th. The Printing Industries Association of Australia, in conjunction with Eastern Suburbs Travel, is organizing tours including a pre-drupa ANZAC-themed tour of Gallipoli and beyond. For details please contact Marty, Vicki or Sonia on 02 9388 0666 or estcolovelly@optusnet.com.au