In a session at the recent Book Business Conference, attended mostly by book publishers, self publishers were derided as being “those people who try to bypass the people in this room”, i.e., the book publishers. It is more likely that self-publishers are those people who were bypassed by the people in that room. Self-publishing is no longer all fatuous self-aggrandizement, much of it is scholarly, artistic,  technically obscure or just didn’t pass beneath the eyes of the right acquisition editor or agent. (Numerous publishers, after all, turned down Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling.) Companies like Lighting Source allow hundreds of publishers (some with very small numbers of titles) as well as individual authors to access the marketplace of ideas without having to print thousands of books.

Instead of producing their non-bestseller titles in lots of 5,000 to 10,000 publishers might be better served to use digital printing technology to produce 500, 1,000 or 2,000 copies of a given title. Get them into the marketplace and see how they do. If they sell, produce more. Use the computerized inventory systems installed in every retailer to monitor inventory and demand levels and develop models to predict demand. Next, use this newfound knowledge to automate reprint orders based on predetermined stock levels and actual demand. Over time, you’re able to build demand curves for books by title, category, by author, even location, enabling just-in-time production and delivery while maintaining minimal inventory levels in drastically downsized warehouses. Yes, it’s complicated to set up, but it’s hardly rocket science and the knowledge and technology from inventory through production is readily available.

The benefits of such a model will take a few years to see, and will result in a more robust publishing industry that runs leaner yet offers a wider selection of titles, brings forth more new authors —and is much more profitable. This is the way publishing can, should, and will be done. The Kindle and other “e-book” readers notwithstanding, printed books are not going away anytime soon, and there is plenty of money still on the table for publishers who see that digital book production is a way to reinvent a business that is in many ways a cornerstone of civilization.

Heidi Tolliver-Nigro noted in a recent posting that 1:1 print jobs are rarely repeated. Let’s think about that for a minute. First, what do we mean by 1:1?? Name and address with a customer loyalty coupon? Some real estate post card application? Those are nice, but they have little or nothing to do with the notion of TransPromo. These 1:1 jobs are one-off projects, simple promotional mailings usually composed in a PostScript of PDF creation tool and printed on cut-sheet machines – usually color. Transactional printing on the other hand is done in huge volumes using AFP/IPDS. When promotional messaging is integrated into these kinds of document you get a whole new thing. First of all you have the opportunity to dump all of the blow-ins, inserts & generic coupons. The result is something currently called TransPromo. TransPromo and 1:1 are two distinctly different kinds of print jobs for two distinctly different markets and different types of customers.
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Earlier this month at Drupa, Océ demonstrated the new JetStream 2200 printing full color newspapers from around the world. We were printing and folding them in real time in the booth. People could stop and pick up today’s copy of the New York Times, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Herald Tribune. The color consistency and image quality of the JetStream produced papers that were superior to the originals being printed half a world away.

Océ has been an active promoter of digital newspaper production dating back to the creation of the Digital Newspaper Network in 2001. In April we made our first foray into world of the daily newspaper with our participation in the Newspapers of America’s NEXPO Conference in Washington, D.C.. At that conference we had an opportunity to introduce ourselves to a market that is almost completely new to us. In preparation for this event certain market forces became clear to us that convinced us that our message was one that they would embrace.

The last couple years the newspaper industry has been under considerable economic pressure. Revenues from national, retail and classified advertising have plummeted – classified being the hardest hit with a decline of over 16% last year. The newspaper industry has been exploring the opportunities of making their content more individualized. They have come up with notions like content tagged to individual carrier routes, neighborhoods and a new concept called “micro-zoning”. The result would be a press run with lots of variable elements and versions. This is not the kind of work that their presses are designed to do.

Enter Océ and our digital message. Our experience in the transactional world makes us exactly partner that they have been looking for without even knowing it. Variable data printing, dynamic composition and advanced data management are some of our strong points and exactly the areas where their industry has the least expertise. When combined with the power of our production management software and our continuous feed printers it is truly a match that shows the way to the future of the newspaper.

In late June we will again be bringing our message to the newspaper industry at a gathering of industry thought leaders in Denver at an event called the second global Conference on the Individuated Newspaper. We have been selected to be a sponsor of this conference that it being hosted by the MediaNews Group. MediaNews Group is one of the largest newspaper companies in the United States situated throughout California, the Rocky Mountain region and the Northeast.