The story about the longevity of chequebooks caught my eye, not least because I'd just emerged from a foray to the back of the string and paperclips drawer to find mine so I could fulfil a cheque payment request. Examining the stubs, I see this particular book is now into its seventh year of operation, and I'm still only about a third of the way through it.

So while I agree with Tall Group's Martin Ruda that cheques will be around for a while yet - particularly business cheques - at this rate they might have to start printing personal chequebooks on archival paper. Cheques, like carbonless paper, have got to that "last iceman" stage where volumes are a fraction of what they once were, but the market becomes increasingly lucrative for the last remaining suppliers.

This jumpstarted a train of thought about the types of printed matter that will have the greatest longevity. Where are the enduring markets where print, for reasons of practicality or efficacy, will not be substituted by other media?

Let me think. Fly posters, tart's cards, parking tickets, P45s, errr... what else? Some point-of-sale materials, packaging (in particular pharmaceutical packaging), booze labels, court documents, some books, and the occasional surprising resurrection such as vinyl records.

It's perhaps easier to draw up a list of printed materials that are likely to see massive changes in terms of the quantities produced, with newspapers being the most-cited example du jour. And I definitely wouldn't be building a long-term business plan around report and accounts, either. I'm looking at a recent mailing from The Annual Reports Service, which offers people in the investment community the opportunity to order reports from hundreds of listed companies by ticking the boxes on one convenient form. You can request a PDF or a printed R&A, and while there is a handful of companies that only supply information in printed form (St Ives, bless them, being one), there are many, many more where print is no longer even available as an option and it's PDF only (irony of ironies, Yell is among the latter). A contact in the City tells me he's noticed that every time he receives an updated listing, the number of blank spaces in the "printed report" column grows bigger and bigger.

The flipside of this being that, like the vinyl example, I'm sure at some point there will be a report and accounts resurgence because print will provide a point of difference. As always in business, success flows from picking the sweet spot. Or from hanging in there until the ice melts.