"drastic increases in printing costs"

The subject line comes from the announcement of the "no print LJ" email.

I have heard this time and time again.....

But I can't understand it!

I can understand "Per copy cost increases due to smaller print runs".

Sort of.

After all, the whole Desktop publishing / electronic typesetting and formatting thing should have massively decreased the set up costs for a print run to nearly zero compared to what it used to be.

But that isn't the claim here.

So why on earth have printing costs drastically increased? Has the computer industry failed totally in it's "Poster Child" application? (Namely typesetting, embedded system controls....?)

Or is the Inkjet Ink scam pushing us back to a pre-Gutenberg Age?

Have people stopped planting trees to paper costs are soaring?

What's happening? What's going on? Why has IT so massively failed?

Hell's Bell's and Buckets of Blood! Must we dig out ye olde hand cranked purple ink sheet and stylus Roneo machines from the museums to get back to "Cheap Desktop Publishing?"

WHAT'S GOING ON OUT THERE!?