The Future of Paper Maps

Thanks go to the All Points Blog for directing us to an interesting article on the future of paper maps. The article is locate here. Link.

To sum it up, the paper maps industry is booming. I thought that with everything going digital that the paper map industry would be struggling, but the opposite is true. As happened to me in college, once I got a taste of maps in my geography courses, I wanted more.

In a short excerpt from the article, Chris Fisk, vice president of JIMAPCO states,

"We are concluding that the products you get on the Internet, such as MapQuest, are helping to educate people about maps," she said. "So people who have never used a map before are inclined to check out something on MapQuest and it appears they are becoming acclimated to maps and going out and buying them."

David Fisk, Chris' husband and president of JIMAPCO states,

"Even dashboard GPS navigation systems wound up making people want maps more, instead of supplanting them."

Pretty amazing that the digital mapping industry has started a boom in the paper map industry.