Outward Bound: Digital Inkjet Expands Opportunities for Book Printers

The advent of digital book printing has changed the business models of many companies involved in traditional book publishing. One business in particular that has found new opportunities in first toner, then inkjet book printing is Bridgeport National Bindery. With roots that extend back to the 19th century, the company was founded in Bridgeport, CT, but in 1999 moved to Agawam, MA, near Springfield. In the decade prior to the move, the company had been paying keen attention to developments in the then-nascent digital printing.

“In 1990, 1991 we began hearing about digital printers getting into the digital book printing space with the Xerox Docutech and Kodak Lionheart,” said Kent Larson, VP of Print On Demand for Bridgeport National Bindery. “Printers had bought this equipment and were doing lot of perfect binding and saddle-stitching, and had a need for casebinding.” Printers would send reams of paper to Bridgeport National Bindery in quantities of 300 or 400 books at a time. “To us, that was a significant run length.”

Over the 1990s, as digital continued to catch on, there was a change in how books were produced. Bridgeport saw early on that digital represented where a large part of the market was going to go. By the middle of the decade, Bridgeport realized that at some point certain customers are going to simply want to order books online on-demand, without the traditional print-inventory-ship model that has been the staple of book publishing for centuries.

Although the bursting of the dot-com bubble reduced momentum to some extent, the broadband revolution that happened at about the same time made it possible to send around the large files necessary for book printing. And Bridgeport began its foray into digital printing—on-demand.

“By 2002,” said Larson, “our customers were coming to us saying, ‘We can’t produce five books, put them in a box, UPS them to you to have you manufacture them, only to send them back to us, to put them into another box and ship them to the customer. We want you to get into printing so we can route files to you.’”

Digital book printing is, of course more than just a print engine, so Bridgeport found the more pressing concern than, well, the press was the basic IT infrastructure. The company hired several recent college grads who could do programming and began building a viable system. “By 2003, we had six months of programming done so we put in our first Docutech,” said Larson. Over the next six months, the company troubleshot the workflow and were up and running. For the next decade, they began expanding the types of books they could produce—6 x 9-inch black-and-white books for publishers doing “long tail” publishing and eventually expanding into the color photobook market with Indigo and Xeikon presses.

“We’re like Lighting Source but on a smaller scale,” said Larson, “and a much wider variety of books.” Bridgeport has business relationships with many major publishers, such as John Wiley & Sons, as well as companies aimed at the growing small and self-publishing market, like Lulu.

Cognizant of new digital printing technologies, Bridgeport had been familiar with inkjet printing, but initially deemed it inappropriate to what they were doing. “We never thought we would ever need inkjet,” said Larson. “It’s too fast, and you need way too much volume to support it.” Last year, however, “it just developed that the marketplace is getting so interested in volume and organizing different bind styles and papers, that we said that we could do inkjet if we could build the right system: the press has to be good—and fast—but the back end has to produce folded and collated book blocks down to a book of one. With HP on the inkjet side and Lasermax Tecnau Group on the back side, we came back from DRUPA two years ago and said, ‘This is where we want to go.’”

Inkjet has turned out to be a great asset for Bridgeport. “We’re doing high-quality color, and high-volume through the inkjet so those two styles of production [toner and inkjet] for us perfectly because we do softcovers, but also very nice hardcover books that are inkjet and toner produced.”

As Bridgeport National Bindery’s digital printing capabilities have evolved, the customer base has collated itself into three primary groups. The first are major publishers who have titles they would prefer to not inventory any longer and thus shift to a print-on-demand model. The publisher sends all the files—interior, cover, dust jacket, and any other book components like inserts—and Bridgeport will produce one physical copy, which is sent back to the publisher for approval. Once granted, the files are locked down and stored on Bridgeport’s server and linked to an order entry portal. When someone orders a book, the order is sent to Bridgeport and the book is printed, bound, and shipped. That customer can be Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or any other online or physical bookstore. This model tends to comprise predominantly 6 x 9-inch or 7 x 10-inch textbooks, color books, novels, etc., both hardcover and paperback binding.

The second type of customer tend to be the customers of Amazon CreateSpace, Lulu, and the like, which are Internet portals for building, publishing, and distributing largely self-published titles. These tend to be novels and business books (even books about the future of the printing industry), but are also photobooks, wedding books, and other short-run, on-demand titles.

The third type is an individual or business which has a book with a short-ish run length of 50 to 150 copies. “They can they send a PDF to our FTP site and have a book made that way,” said Larson.

The addition of inkjet printing has also increased the other types of publications that Bridgeport can produce. “With inkjet, now we can do magazines,” said Larson, “60-lb., coated stock magazines one at a time that look absolutely terrific. What print-on-demand meant to books a decade ago, it might mean to the magazine industry, being able to do one-at-a-time magazines. That could be a huge change in the magazine industry.”

Larson, like other digital book printers, see digital—and digital inkjet—not necessarily as the future of book printing and publishing, but one of several futures.

“[The industry] is not evolving away from the old model,” said Larson. “Warehousing plays a part, and there’s certainly a volume of scale that warrants keeping that model alive. What’s going to change is people’s philosophy about what will go into that model.” That is, which is more important, a cheaper cost per book, or an elimination of all the ancillary costs and logistics involved with warehousing and fulfillment?

At the same time, the print-on-demand model is helping more people and smaller publishers publish their books than ever before—hopefully vanquishing what used to be the derogatory term “vanity publishing.” Overall, this boosts the number of titles being published.

“More and more titles are being produced every year, therefore more titles will go into this [print-on-demand] model, but the traditional model will still be there.”