Portfolios: Print vs Digital

I am a web designer. Majority of the design work I do is for the web. I say this because not only do I have a web portfolio but a printed portfolio as well, which I haven’t used or updated in over a year. I remember back in school it was always stress that we have a physical portfolio and the web version came secondary. That was years ago and nowadays you hear people saying print is dead, and digital is the wave of the present/future. It is really?

Last night I was thinking about updating my printed portfolios and questioning should I even invest the money to do so? Other questions that came to mind where – Should I even have a book when the majority of my work is web based? What if I get an opportunity to be an in-house freelancer in the future? What if my local clientele picks this year? Either way I will be totally unprepared because both of my books are outdated. I have my “professional book”, an aluminum book that I’ve used for interviews and another that I refer to as my design deck.

The design deck is a binder filled with every job I have done. I got the idea to create my own because I was in charge of keeping one updated at my previous job. We had a binder which stayed with the VP of the Marketing Department and it consisted of every job for the entire year that was done from Billboards to Press Kits to Corporate Promotional items by all of the internal departments of the company. So I am at a crossroads. Should I go ahead an update my books or just focus on my web portfolio? Or maybe I can just take what I would’ve done for the print portfolio and turn it into a downloadable PDF document? That way if I ever need to print it, I will already have it done already.

Now I would like to hear from you, especially my non-designers readers? I know web/graphic/fashion designers and photographers need portfolios, but what about other professions?