Digital Book Printing, More Publishers Waking Up to the Benefits
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008Book Business Magazine has an article in this month’s issue on digital book printing and print on-demand (available online here).
The article points out the success PublicAffairs, an imprint of The Perseus Books Group had with moving one its fast selling books to a print on-demand model at Lighting Source:
Demand went vertical, and there was a period of time when orders were coming in and they [didn’t have] any copies … [available] anywhere,” says Lightning Source President David Taylor. “So John Ingram said to Peter Osnos, ‘Look, give us the file, and we’ll set it up as an on-demand model, and we’ll fulfill at least some of those orders.’ ”
The problem for Perseus became an opportunity for Ingram to show the world the value of on-demand digital printing.
“We got the file from them on the Monday morning after BookExpo America, and we were printing the first books that afternoon,” Taylor recounts. “We actually moved over our entire casebook production to just that book for a period of 48 hours. We printed several thousand copies, and those were orders that otherwise would have just [been lost] or would have not been fulfilled. When the offset order came back in, we switched it off.”
An interesting comment from Edwards Brothers CEO John Edwards on not using digital to describe the printing process:
“I’m trying to not call it digital anymore,” he says. “It’s short-run. I don’t want to have to differentiate anymore [between digital and offset]. We’re focusing on making it seamless for the publishing community as far as how [a book is] made.”
This makes a lot of sense. There are still a lot of print buyers in the industry that perceive digital as inferior. Something that is easily debunked by showing printed product samples.
Read the whole article at Book Business.
