Gary George, a long-time FlightCheck Professional user, now turned industry consultant, has what I think is a great idea… Newspapers printed on-demand via kiosks! FlightCheck is a preflight tool for desktop application files and is beneficial to a printer digital or non-digital. Check out his blog post on this brainstorm:

On-Demand Newspaper Kiosks

“Here I am again gassing away about an idea that I shared with some people I know (Andy Frazer & Andrzej Wojtowicz) on our Linkedin Tunicca Premedia Lounge, the idea focused about a kiosk for newspapers that provided user focused content that was printed on demand.

Originally I was thinking this was a bit of a dumb idea, but through email discussions with the guys it would appear that actually we could actually be on a winner here….. let’s look at what it would be and why it might actually work!”
Source: http://tunicca.wordpress.com/2009/06/10/a-possible-future-for-news-print/

Yes, it surely might work! I remember seeing, oh about 10-years ago, a digitally printed, special edition of a German newspaper on their ICE high-speed train service. Today with the World Wide Web, personalization, quality of digital printing and relative size of a decent digital press, makes this idea almost certainly a winner. Gary dreams up more on this:

“But what if, a consumer could go to his local newsagents on the way to work and a personalised copy of his news is there waiting for him, or he states an arrival time at a destination station where he would collect his paper from. What about getting on a flight and being able to select the language of the paper you wish you read as well as the type of content….”

For sure, airports, subways but even busy city street corners would be logical places for such devices. Hmmm, maybe you could retro-fit these to act as “Download Points” for eBooks and eNewspapers for the Amazon Kindle and what have you? Oh, sure, maybe petrol or gas stations would be a nice place to have these surely sponsored kiosks, offering today’s news, now, printed on-demand.

With the Internet, the content could literally be FRESH, 24-7. You may need to print your copy several times a day, to stay up-to-date on breaking news! Well, anyway, I love this idea- great going Gary.

Tags: Amazon Kindle, eBooks, future of publishing, Gary George, Kindle for Newspaper, Newspaper kiosk, newspaper printing, newspaper publishing, on-deman printing, on-demand newspapers, personalized printing, printer digital, publishing, Tunicca Premedia

This entry was posted on Friday, June 12th, 2009 at 1:08 am and is filed under Print and Publishing News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.