Please excuse my ‘pig Latin.’ As any wine-lover knows ‘In vino veritas’ is a well known excuse for ‘okay, just one more.’ In wine – the truth.

With our morphing industry, could it be argued that digital processes are the ‘wine of truth’ that expose long-believed shibboleths in the print media business?

Digital by nature is trackable, measurable and therefore monetizable once a metric is applied to the time and space. Most offset printers I know have spent fortunes on costing and estimating programs and personnel, and still ‘hidden costs’ rear their weasel-like heads, compromising profit and souring client relationships if they are asked to pay a bit more ‘for the file fixes’ e.g.

Of course for savvy printers, the reverse has been a lucrative area for years. Build enough ‘padding’ into the job, get the costs down and you can experience what London Cockney hucksters call ‘a good little earner.’ Extra profit because you over-quoted. However, in today’s world, it’s usually profit erosion that hits the poor printer.

What digital does is lock down your costs to a known quantum. Equipment lease + rent + labor + click + utilities + consumable equals TCO – total cost of operation. This is often calculated by the equipment vendor from word go, so long as he knows your applications and volumes. In the offset world, you buy a press and some CTP and work it out yourself. Many printers must be getting it wrong judging by the number of business failures.

It affects digital printers too, but it shouldn’t. Here in Australia, one of our premier digital houses with two i-Gens, Nuveras and Docutechs fell into administration 2 weeks ago. It was a great business run by a great guy – an American in fact. But it is believed he was using offset profit margin thinking on digital. It’s a tragedy but at least this business was quickly snapped up by a newly-energised 107-year-old offset house that happened to be looking into buying digital presses and now have both the presses and a business. They probably got a bargain.

They say that in a bear market, or recession, “money returns to its rightful owners.” Any business needs to harvest a ‘bit of surplus for the winter.’ If this is there, instead of increased borrowings at punitive interest, hard times can be ridden out.

Digital, correctly applied, sorts it all out. Every nook and cranny of cost can be discovered and charged for. It enables free-market competition to flourish from a known baseline, unlike many offset shops who take on work ‘to keep the presses rolling.’

Some say that offset equipment vendors have assisted the overcapacity and hyper-competition that has driven profit away from print businesses. Let’s hope the same won’t apply to digital as it juggernauts its way further into our sector.

In digio veritas – you know where you stand; don’t blow it. Time for a cool Zinfandel. Cheers!

I bought a book last weekend. Hardly Nirvana news eh? Bear with me; this book will be something I will treasure and use for a long time – it’s a guide to cruising the great waterways encircling where I live (Sydney, Australia). I gladly paid $27.95 (Aussie dollars – about $19.50 US) for this 162-page heavily illustrated ‘C’ size book with 4-page limp board covers.

Here’s the kicker – in the frenzy of all-colour digital printing, we are at risk of forgetting that fantastic and appealing books are being produced with 94% of the content printed in black. My Cruising Guide has CMYK outside covers, laminated, and an 8-page CMYK section bound into the middle. All the rest, the line drawings, the maps, the halftones, are just K, and it looks great.

With the cost of printed information becoming a major consideration to consumers, anything that brings book costs down is a good thing. Digital or offset, printing the black content separately from the CMYK and collating the publication ready for binding delivers cost benefits to the printer and value to the reader.

The funny thing is, as I was browsing the pages of this fine book (first published in 1989 and reprinted with updates seven times since then), when I hit the colour section in the middle, I did not get any sense of ‘wow, some colour – why isn’t the whole book this way?’ The clarity and simplicity of the mono work, the professional typesetting and printing by Ligare – a division of the Opus Print Group – conveys all the information I need. Port is left and Starboard is right – I don’t necessarily need red and green ink to show me this.

Now Caslon North American research shows digital colour in books is set to grow 43% between 2007 and 2012, against 14% growth in black. The growth in digital mono can be attributed to the migration of shorter-run offset-printed ‘read for pleasure’ titles to digital; novels, biographies etc, which tend to be text only inside.

But I wonder how many illustrated books and other publications, printed end-to-end in full colour, could benefit from a high percentage of mono pages, reducing production costs and, in an unexpected way, improving the quality of the information conveyed?

We all get excited about faster and better quality digital presses, whether toner or inkjet; but what about the finishing? Can an offset printer adding digital rely on legacy finishing equipment to trim, fold, bind and stack the jobs or must he investigate digital-specific equipment – or even consider inline finishing? 

Last week I had the pleasure of attending a workshop put on by Swiss paper handling company Hunkeler, and presented by Asia Pacific Sales Director Patrick Lehmann. Now Patrick is a guy you’d love to have on any team. He is passionate about quality paper handling and his smile lights up like a Christmas Tree as he describes his company’s precision engineering approach to high volume paper handling for the direct mail, transpromo, book, commercial print and newspaper sectors. 

Hunkeler has initiated its ‘huncolor’ product programme where smoother paper paths reduce or eliminate marking on more sensitive full-colour digital print travelling at high speeds. Its main environment is reel-fed but configurations can go roll-to-sheet for use on sheetfed digital machines, roll-to-roll for offline finishing, roll-to-fold and roll-to-complete book blocks ready for perfect binding in, say, a Mueller Martini Amigo digital binder. Webs can be merged and plough-folded and even include web inspection cameras, like a mini web offset or gravure site. 

Its POPP 6 Generation of unwinders, rewinders, folders, collators and stackers can now travel at over 200 metres (656 feet) per minute, keeping up with the fastest digital web presses and the new POPP7 widens web width from 543mm (20.5”) to 670mm (26.8”). All of Hunkeler’s equipment is specifically engineered for the needs of digital production, with Weko paper conditioners included where necessary for re-moistening or silicone coating. 

Sheetfed digital also benefits from dedicated digital finishing equipment. Toner ‘cracking’ has long been a bane of digital printers, resulting in untidy spines on stitched products. Designers can ‘cheat’ by leaving a toner-free gap along the spine of the cover, but the best solution is a digitally-capable creaser/folder. Graphic Whizard’s CreaseMaster series scores the fold first, eliminating toner cracking. British company Morgana has also focussed on the needs of digital finishing with creasers, folders, numbering machines, collators, cutters and binders. Finishing giants Horizon and Duplo, as expected, have re-engineered offset finishing equipment to deal with sheetfed digital specifics, and included JDF features. 

We’re seeing more digital embellishing entering the market such as digital foilers, varnishers, coaters, spot-coaters, die-cutters and so forth. This is good news and it takes the focus away from ‘cost per sheet’ and adds value. 

At Drupa in May we saw several finishing suppliers with complete production lines, where the print engine was maybe only one-fifth of the whole concept – and could come from a variety of suppliers. This tends to indicate we could be headed for a finishing-centric (if that makes sense), digital future where the profit is in the paper handling, rather than putting toner or jetting ink onto substrates. 

As the ‘big guys’ of finishing take a keener interest in the growing needs of smaller format, slower speed digital printers, we can expect to see high-end capabilities coming into digital finishing, particularly with web/continuous feed. 

I recall one of the very first Indigo installations in the UK was a company printing hotel printware; door hangers, tent and pyramid cards, key wallets etc. Hardly a flat sheet came out of that establishment. They were profitable from day one and are still in business – all thanks to good digital finishing.

No, this is not a new title from the great Wiley Publishing organization (201 years old and going strong) – not unless they invite me to write it anyway. When Wiley bought IDG books, it acquired one of the modern publishing industry’s greatest success stories. So successful, there was room for a parallel series from MacMillan – The ‘Complete Idiot’s’ guides.

I confess, I’ve bought a few over the years including the very first title ‘DOS for Dummies.’ Yes, Microsoft’s first quick-and-dirty operating system spawned a publishing tsunami; initially covering computer education ‘for the rest of us,’ (i.e. non-geeks), and today with over 1,000 titles in 39 languages creating a global idiocracy exploring almost every niche, nook and cranny of human experience. ‘For Dummies’ in Icelandic is Fynir kjána and in Polish is Dla opomych. I have no idea why I just told you that.

Of course, the publishers are smart enough to know their customers are neither dummies nor idiots. The genre was a stroke of marketing genius, building on over 50 years’ success of Hodder’s ‘Teach Yourself’ books – which continue to be published. But when pesky PCs with partitioned DOS drives started cropping up on desks, ‘teaching yourself’ was not a popular choice. We just wanted the darn computers to work and not crash; we felt intimidated by having the power of ENIAC on our desktops. We personally owned more number-crunching ability than the entire Manhattan Project and were quite prepared to be gently ribbed as ‘dummies’ and ‘idiots’ in order to acquire just enough knowledge.

The rest is publishing history and the ‘easy guide’ genre continues to sell well, defying a move for this kind of information to shift onto the ‘net. Approaching 180 million copies of the ‘Dummies’ titles alone have been sold worldwide.

But the book: ‘Digital Printing for Dummies’ does not appear to exist for commercial print. If it did, what would it say? First, buy your shiny new box? Or first, built your network with W2P? Would it advocate exclusively a TCO (Total Cost of Operation) costing approach so every page turns a profit; or would it say “be a real dummy and follow the offset pricing trends?” Would it say “accurate colour does not matter,” and “the way to win business is to be cheaper than the other guy?” Or would it say that it’s the business you say “no” to in digital that helps your bottom line. Would it position printing as a manufacturing or craft-based business, or advocate a total customer service model? There must be hundreds more.

What do you think?