The Future of Documents

I don’t know about you, but I was staggered by some of the numbers   on the “paper world” or how many pages are printed worldwide. I did a bit of investigation on the topic :

• The 53 trillion pages in 2010 is HP’s estimate of eligible potential for digital printing mentioned in their Print 2.0 press release.

In addition to the traditional 8.5″ x 11″ / A4 printing this includes the analog (offset) printing from the graphic arts community, photo books and other related applications that could migrate to digital.  90% of the 53 trillion page estimate comes from graphic arts environments, including transpromotional documents and photo printing.

This estimate also includes an estimate of web enabled printing, such as blogs, reformatted web-print pages (48% of all printing originates from the Internet, still according to HP).  

The actual share of digital printing in that volume is relatively small: 9% of the estimated 49 trillion pages are printed digitally today, and that should grow to around 10% of the 53 trillion by 2010, still according to HP.

Not that I did not trust HP’s information, but I wanted to get another viewpoint to cross-check that information. I got it from another Industry Analyst, Lyra Research, which gave me a slightly different estimate on the size of the expanding paper universe (but still in the same order of magnitude):

• “The total paper market at 15.2 trillion pages worldwide, which includes uncoated freesheet, uncoated mechanical paper, supercalendared paper, coated paper, and newsprint.
• The 15.2 T figure is shipments, but we also assume that these pages are used. The data is from 2006, and we anticipate a growth of about 3% worldwide over the next ten years.”

The bottomline is, although staggering, HP’s and Lyra’s number coincide (they do not count exactly the same thing, but the order of magnitude is the same). And the paper universe is still growing (although nowhere as fast as the digital universe)…

Thanks Xerox’s Corporate Library for collecting and cross-checking all that excellent information.