Long Live the 'P-Book!'

E-book, schmee-book, or so says Mitch Weiss, sales VP of book printer Offset Paperback Manufacturers (OPM). Citing statistics that we in the industry have heard ad nauseam—how Internet advertising spending is up dramatically but print ad spend is flat to down, and how electronic book sales are growing fast while printed book (“p-books,” he calls them) volumes shorten—Weiss reminds us just how fat that wedge of the eroding print pie is to begin with. For example, the OPM web-offset printing plant tucked away in the scenic Pocono Northeast (Dallas, PA) churns out 1.2 million books daily at a rate of more than one million pages per hour. That’s a lot of ink and paper tonnage feeding a variety of presses, including Timsons and others built using older technology. The annual tally of 350 million mass-market and digest book products makes OPM arguably the largest book printer/manufacturer in the world.

OPM is a sub-unit of Bertelsmann (see sidebar), the 175-year-old, international conglomerate based in Germany that knows a thing or two about diversified media. In the magazine and book publishing spaces, Bertelsmann owns Gruner + Jahr and Random House. The latter placed 138 titles on the New York Times bestseller lists, including the Stieg Larsson Millennium trilogy, which sold 6.5 million p- and e-books in the US and Germany during the first half of 2010. In the US, RH’s e-book sales surged 300 percent in the first six months, and comparably in Germany and the UK. The company’s e-program in these countries cumulatively expanded to 20,000 titles. But such e-growth still represents a relatively small portion of overall publishing revenues.

Weiss’s interests lie in printed books, especially those of the digital variety that can help his firm’s customers meet their publishing challenges: namely, reducing costs of short-run book products. Publishers, such as major account the Reader’s Digest Association, view the printing press as a virtual warehouse, says Weiss. They don’t want or like excess inventory, nor can they afford it any longer. Worldwide, more than 25 percent of all books produced are never sold, according to a report by HP; they are returned to publishers for pulping.

The Kodak Prosper 1000 monochrome inkjet web press that OPM installed in February replaced three toner-based digital presses. “We’re producing the same volume of books with one-third the labor investment,” notes Weiss. “It takes us only 15 minutes to go from file to complete books.” Four older electro-photographic production printers remain on the floor. Meanwhile, the firm added the 5000XL color model in August that still is in start-up mode. Between the two new Kodak presses and a Muller-Martini inline bindery set up, Weiss estimates that OPM has invested a total of $5 million in the inkjet web digital production platform in 2010, of which the finishing solution represents about $2 million.

Going with the Kodak inkjet web technology makes sense for OPM because it already had Creo/Prinergy workflow in place and also uses Kodak plates and other consumables. Plus, “Kodak understands books … and was willing to learn from us,” says Weiss.

World Record Setter

With annual sales of approximately $350 million, OPM says it is producing between 5,000 and 6,000 mass-market books per shift on the model 1000 black-and-white perfecting inkjet web press. “Kodak Prosper at OPM has set a world record printing two million delivered pages in an eight-hour shift on a single digital press,” observes Technology Watch newsletter editor Henry Freedman, who was one of some 20 trade journalists and industry analysts present at a November 10 open house. “This qualifies Kodak’s accomplishment an ‘industry-leading game changer’ … as the digital inkjet press market heats up.”

The Prosper 5000XL Press offers four-over-four perfected output at run speeds surpassing 3,600 A4 or letter pages per minute (ppm) on coated, uncoated or glossy paper stock. Freedman was high on the 5000XL, with its 900-x-600-dpi resolution, a month earlier at GRAPH EXPO, where he told me about the “amazing” physics behind Kodak’s color inkjet web technology. “It runs at 3,600 digital ppm—all variable,” he said on the show floor in Chicago. “That’s seven billion droplets per second! You can’t do that with drop-on-demand [DOD] inkjet. You’d have to have many, many heads.” Kodak reports that Prosper inkjet head life is 1,000 hours now and will double by the end of 2011.

To date, OPM has shipped nearly 500,000 mass-market, rack-sized books printed on its monochrome Prosper 1000. “Since July, we’ve been consistently producing books for sale in bookstores without a single reject,” says a company spokesperson. During its August peak season, OPM produced 140 million pages via the Prosper. Weiss says the firm expects to produce a total of close to two billion pages per year: “One billion to 1.5 billion [pages] per Kodak machine.” Typical book formats are 3-1/8 by 8.25 inches and 6-1/8 by 9.25 inches, and the Prosper’s imposition enables four-up perfecting of 6x9-inch trimmed books, yielding 1,300 books per hour based on 16-page signatures – the industry’s highest productivity in digital book production, says Kodak.

Plenty of Room for Digital Growth

Kodak research shows that most publishers (and printers) expect no to slow growth in the volume of printed books—either flat or a decline of about two percent. “Publishers counts are coming down,” Weiss attests, citing numbers that are even more dramatic: “Where they may have printed two million copies in the past, they may only want 500,000 now,” he says, adding that mid-level volumes have halved, from press runs of 20,000 down to 10,000 books, in some cases.

Estimates reveal that some 65 trillion pages are offset-printed per year globally. To date, approximately nine percent of all book covers and raw pages now produced in North America are printed digitally. In the US, only about 130 billion pages are printed annually on production color digital presses. As inkjet costs drop, the number of pages printed digitally worldwide could approach five trillion by 2015, Kodak projects.

Economic short runs are key, says Weiss, for digital press runs of under 2,500 books or so. “Handling all these short orders requires a different mindset,” he explains, “especially on the front end with automated data entry as opposed to the traditional CSR model.” Acknowledging that “four-color printing went offshore, to China, years ago,” he adds that his firm sees opportunity in color now that sales have slowed down and the market has matured. Indeed, Kodak says one reason for the growth in digital printing is profit margin: 20 to 40 percent compared with one to four percent for offset.

The Prosper has a precoater option—what Kodak calls the “Image Optimization Station”—which about two-thirds of the press’s purchasers have requested to date. Weiss says drying has not been a problem as Kodak’s new architecture uses near-infrared energy to dry inks instantly.

At the open house, we saw a 650-page book (6x9-inch trim size) printing four-up (perfected) on 50-pound offset stock and running at 650 fpm on the Prosper 1000 monochrome digital press. It was quite an impressive sight and powerful to see inkjet-web technology operating in a live production environment as opposed to on a tradeshow floor.

How Bertelsmann Breaks Down US Print

Known in North America as Arvato Print USA, Bertelsmann’s print business here consists of four companies:

1. Coral Graphics with three plants in Hicksville, NY, Winchester, VA, and Louisville, KY;
2. Dynamic Graphics based in Horsham, PA;
3. Berryville Graphics in Berryville, VA, 60 miles west of Washington, D.C.; and
4. sister firm OPM with its conventional and digital divisions.

OPM Building 10, where its new pair of Kodak Prosper inkjet web presses is housed, is situated in Laughlin, PA, two hours driving time from New York City with easy access to the major corporate centers of most US publishers. The plants here and in nearby Dallas, PA, are 90 miles north of Philadelphia and convenient to major interstate highways that serve the northeast as well as the southern and mid-western states.

Historically, OPM has been manufacturing books digitally for more than 25 years. It began in 1983 using Xerox cut-sheet printing equipment to produce review copies of books in advance of mass production. (Today, the firm sports an iGen press as well.)

[BOX]

Was it e-hype?

Reality check: Sales of magazine apps for the Apple iPad actually have been declining since their mid-2010 peak, reports Folio: in its November issue. Furthermore, two of three Americans prefer print media, heralds recent research from Harris Interactive.