Bound for Glory

Back in 1996, a colleague of mine was conducting a seminar on on-demand book printing. A giveaway at the seminar was to be a book on the topic which was itself being printed on-demand. The organizers hit a snag when the book didn’t arrive in time for the session, as it was, the printer said, “out of stock.” Commented my colleague at the time: “Someone doesn’t quite understand the concept of ‘on-demand printing.’”

The traditional book printing and publishing model of mass printing, warehousing, distribution and shipping, and returns, is chock full of waste and needless expense. Unless a book is by a bestselling author—or becomes a bestseller—it’s a highly inefficient process. The advent of digital book printing in the 1980s and its maturity in the 1990s promised—and in many cases delivered—greater efficiency and economy in book printing. At the same time, it has opened up book publishing to smaller and even self publishers who had been blocked from traditional publishing markets, or consigned to what was derogatorily referred to as “vanity publishing.” And e-commerce solved one of the last remaining barriers to entry—distribution.

Today’s production inkjet presses are taking the promise of digital book printing even further, and are not only enabling short-run and on-demand book printing, but are also facilitating new book applications such as versioning, customization, personalization, and full-color book printing. They are also, to some extent, changing our perception of what a book is.

“Production inkjet is being adopted, and becoming more of a standard, for book production and printing book components” said Stephen Sanker, Global Marketing Group Director, Strategic Marketing and Product Planning Production Ink jet Systems, Fujifilm. “Different applications and new book development for specific interests, very targeted content, and for very short runs have been the easiest transition to production inkjet. In addition, we see that certain niche applications within the overall book market very easily transitioning to shorter-run, lower-cost, and less-waste methods of manufacturing because production inkjet provides all those benefits.”

Turning Pages

It should be no surprise what the two biggest drivers of digital book printing are, be it toner- or inkjet-based: short run lengths and some degree of customization and personalization. However, “short run” is a term we use advisedly.

“Short run is always relative,” said Adi Chinai, managing director of Lowell, MA’s King Printing, a pioneer of digital book printing. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, he said, “the longer runs were a few hundred thousand, and short run was 10 or 20 thousand.”

King Printing was founded in 1978 and started off as an offset shop, focusing on short- to medium-run book printing. King entered the digital book printing market even before there was a digital book printing market; in the late 1980s, the company was a beta site for what became the Xerox Docutech. By the end of the decade, King was printing one-color books digitally as well as on a web offset press. In 2008, King saw the winds of change blowing in an inkjet direction and by 2010, had transitioned to the HP T300 series.

“We saw there was a migration from predominantly one-color books to full-color books in that customers were looking for different kinds of products that could drive their top and bottom lines,” said Chinai. “So we used inkjet to drive that.”

At the same time, he added, “We’ve seen that customers are looking for faster time to market, higher quality output, and different substrates.”

Color and shorter runs are thus driving a lot of the transition to inkjet book printing.

“Our average run is about 55 books,” said Adam DeMaestri, president of BR Printers. “We have some large ones—2,000 copies, as well as some ones and twos.”

Manual Transmission

BR Printers was founded in 1991 in San Jose, CA, and was a digital shop from the outset—at one time, they had 14 Docutechs pumping out manuals for a broad range of high-tech companies in Silicon Valley. However, like other companies that were printing those materials, BR Printers watched as they quickly went electronic. “As time went on, that work went on CDs and online and we had to reimagine ourselves,” said DeMaestri. BR Printers pursued higher education books and corporate training materials. BR opened a facility in Independence, KY, in 2007 and a third in Hightstown, N.J., in 2011, strategically covering most of the country. BR Printers expanded into inkjet in 2011 by installing a Ricoh Infoprint 5000 in its Kentucky facility, and last spring installed an HP T230 Inkjet Web Press in its San Jose plant.

“We do a lot of four-color books, some customized and personalized books,” said DeMaestri. For educational markets, BR prints books that have an access code on the inside cover or on the first page that gives a student access to the online course materials. These types of personalized applications can also add unique passwords and PURLs (personalized URLs) for each student.

King Printing, another company that had specialized in technical manuals and documentation, also had to seek out other markets. That has also largely involved educational and general trade publishing, as well as areas that blur the line between books and other types of publications, such as catalogs. Essentially, said Chinai, “any type of bound printed material.”

Indeed, the challenge that these and other printing companies have is not the inkjet technology, but rather getting the work to put on the presses. “We have to get a lot of pages to keep these machines running,” said DeMaestri. “That’s been the big challenge, to run them at capacity. We’re working on that around the clock.”

For BR Printers, that also involves pursuing other markets, like insurance and other verticals. “We’re not necessarily a transpromotional printer, we’re a book printer, so we’re trying to find other markets that print books in four-color,” said DeMaestri. “Maybe people that didn’t think that color was in their budget before. It’s a tough market to crack.”

Production inkjet also enable other types of value-added applications, such as high-impact covers and even inserts in the book block itself. “Printers can really create high-impact inserts such as customized advertising or promotional components,” said Fujifilm’s Sanker. “A fully digital production inkjet technology workflow offers that ability.”

A lot of the outbound marketing effort involves demonstrating to publishers and other present and prospective customers just what the technology can do.

“Without question, education and knowledge-sharing around what these technologies can do is imperative,” said Sanker. “New applications exist and customers are need to be fully aware of what they are able to design or how to create content using the technology. This education and knowledge sharing process is imperative to enabling that awareness. From what we are seeing, short-run, high-impact, full-color capabilities exist and designers, editors, along with other creative, are finding new ways to use these new technologies.”

“The largest hurdle is educating the end user or the buyer about the benefits of the technology and what it can bring to the table,” concurred Chinai. It also deepens the relationship that a printer has with a client, “It’s more of relational type of situation,” he added. “We’re working closer, and in a tight integration with those customers that are embracing the technology.”

POD People

Most digital book printers today are bullish on the notion of an increasing chunk of book printing transitioning from the inventory-and-warehouse model to a print-on-demand (POD)/just-in-time (JIT) model, but even long-run publishing can benefit from at least a partial print-on-demand approach.

“When someone designs a new piece or a publisher comes out with, or would like to develop, a new targeted publication, oftentimes they will do a trial run or some sort of versioning, and these applications fit very well into production inkjet,” said Fujifilm’s Sanker.

In previous stories in Inkjet’s Age and on MyPrintResource, we saw that production inkjet is changing how newspapers are conceived and produced—and even what constitutes a newspapers. So, too, are technology and creative printers and publishers, changing our notions of what constitutes a “book” and how books are produced. At some point in the future, it may some day become what the Post Office used to generically call “bound printed matter.”