Digital Printing: A Bright Future for Books
This spring, I attended the Ricoh Publishing Executive Symposium, which gathered book manufacturers, paper suppliers and book publishers to discuss the future of digital printing. Several sessions at the event emphasized how advances in digital printing technology are reshaping the supply chain and driving greater revenue for both publishers and printers.
Several book industry leaders were in attendance, and I had the chance to speak with a handful of them to discuss their perspectives on digital printing and the opportunities it presents to the industry.
What follows is a series of Q&As with three of the leaders in which they share their expectations for the future of digital printing technology, including production inkjet.
Kurt Scherwatzky, Director of Production Services Procurement, John Wiley & Sons
Q. What trends are you seeing around digital book printing today? How has it affected the book industry?
A. Whether it’s Wiley or any other publishing company, we’ve been seeing over the years the ratio turn in the favor of digital printing. I was at another major educational publisher for 20 years and we saw year-over-year a tremendous increase in digital printing. Publishers don’t want to carry a lot of inventory anymore. Gone are the days where publishers were into the warehouse business; owning warehouses and just stocking millions of books in them.
As publishers are closing warehouses they’re sourcing their warehousing out to other companies to do it for them. Along with the reduction of inventoried warehouse items, publishers are increasingly wanting to print closer to where their customer base is, so distributive print is becoming popular. It’s going to continue to get stronger. The idea of distributive print is that publishers are able to send their files, ideally digitally, to one central location and then have it printed wherever the customer base is.
Q. How has digital printing quality changed in recent years?
A. In terms of the increase in quality, I’ve been doing this long enough to remember the days when you’d get a digitally printed book and it was twice as thick as its offset counterpart. Toner on paper would make the books very thick. Now we’re dealing with ink on paper with an inkjet press and you’re not getting that thickness added to the book. We’re getting much better quality now.
Just think about the past two or three years and the improvements in quality that we’ve seen. You’re getting a better visual representation of how the book is supposed to look, but you’re also getting better quality paper, better adhesion to the paper. You’re not getting smudging. We’re seeing improvements in binding too. The product specs are really coming together.
Q. What challenges do you see the industry still facing in terms of adopting digital printing?
A. I would say the education of the other functional areas within a publishing house. We in manufacturing understand that it’s in many cases better to print a smaller quantity of books, not to store that larger quantity of books, and print closer to the demand. On the other hand, you still have folks that are comparing the unit costs. The book, printed digitally, will be more expensive, but you are saving in other areas of the supply chain. That’s a challenge for folks like me who are in the manufacturing sourcing area who understand it.
Q. What are you doing to try to explain these benefits to colleagues in your organization?
A. It is a cultural shift. You try to look at not just the unit cost of the book, but also the total cost of the printing. If we’re talking about printing 100 books and the unit cost is higher, you have to compare the total cost of printing, say, 10,000 units with offset. How many of those books are going to remain unsold, sitting on shelves in your warehouse? And how many are going to be destroyed at the end of the year? I try to have those conversations and get folks to understand the costs of carrying inventory. Sometimes just having the conversation more than once, I hope, will help.
Q. How do you see digital book printing evolving in the industry over the next three years?
A. I think the path is there. It’s going to continue to grow. It’s going to enable publishers to achieve both the customization that they want to achieve and also that low inventory position. The challenge internally is significant, getting folks outside of manufacturing and sourcing to understand the benefit. Hopefully the benefits will advance at a faster rate to help tell the other parties about this story.
Q. Any final thoughts on digital book printing’s future?
A. The samples that I’ve seen today have looked really good. It’s nice to see the quality come to this point. It’s exciting. People talk about print being dead or print dying, neither of which is true. Whether it’s the book or a CD or a record, the physical medium is far from over. It’s just changing. And I like that a publisher like Wiley is willing to embrace the fact that print is still a very important part of education.
Jean-François Lyet,Technical Director, Hachette Livre
Q. How is Hachette Livre utilizing digital book printing right now? Is it a significant part of your business? A. Yes, in fact, this is a major part of the business for two segments. We mainly print with digital technology for the monochrome trade market and also the monochrome university/academic segment.
Q. Are you doing new trade releases digitally or doing backlist for trade?
A. We mainly do digital printing for the backlist. Just to give you a rough idea in terms of our print runs, we now do more print jobs digitally for the trade market than with the traditional analog technology. In terms of volume, that’s completely different. Up to now, we print roughly 20% of the trade volumes with digital and 80% with traditional offset technology.
Q. Are you doing a mix of digital toner and inkjet?
A. Yes, for the very small print runs like print-on-demand, we use sheetfed toner technology. As the print runs increase, we move to web press toner technology, and then we move to web press inkjet technology. We can reach up to — for the monochrome business — 3,000 to 5,000 copies per print run with the inkjet web press.
Q. What are some of the opportunities digital printing opens up for Hachette?
A. The main opportunity that we have with digital technology, including inkjet, is that we are now able to drastically reduce the print runs and to print only what we need. This is really the main advantage for us. We can reduce the runs; we can reduce the inventory; we can increase the cash. That’s a great opportunity for us.
Q. What are the barriers to more widespread adoption of digital printing at Hachette Livre?
A. What we expect for the future is that we can also use digital technology for four-color books. But up to now we can do that only for very short print runs, due to the fact that unit costs are still too high with inkjet. We expect in the future, thanks to volumes increases and technology development, that we will be able to move more volumes to inkjet for the four-color business.
Q. As Hachette Livre reduces its inventory, will it close its warehouses as well?
A. We are very far from closing our warehouses. I cannot imagine that we will be able to use digital technology for the bestsellers. For the books where we sell more than 10,000 or 20,000 copies per year, it doesn’t make sense to use the inkjet or digital technologies.
Q. How will Hachette Livre’s use of digital printing technology evolve over the next three to five years?
A. What I expect is that as we move the monochrome business to inkjet technology, we will also move a significant part of the four-color business, mainly for two segments — the educational front and the university/academic front. Those will be the main two targets within the next few years.
Michael DeFazio, VP of Paper Purchasing and Production Planning, Penguin Random House
Q. How is Penguin Random House (PRH) utilizing digital book printing technology currently?
A. Right now we’re using it mainly for one-color text printing on our backlist, although we are digitally printing a smaller quantity of front list and first-printing books. It’s a small percentage of our overall printing right now.
Q. For the front list, would that be debut authors that you’re printing digitally?
A. It might be a debut author. It might be a reissue of an existing book, repackaging it and bringing it out into the marketplace for the first time again.
Q. What opportunities do you see in digital book printing for PRH?
A. There is an opportunity for making digital printing a larger percentage of our overall one-color printing. I think there’s an opportunity to better manage the inventory for our backlist, better space management in our warehouse, and better cash control, which is also an inventory play.
Q. Is zero-inventory publishing, where no warehousing is required for a title, something PRH will pursue in the future?
A. It could be. I wouldn’t say it’s a five-year goal. There’s still a lot that we need to do internally. I think the technology needs to advance a little more, and the infrastructure would need to be built out a little further for that.
Having satellite or hub printing is probably the way I see that rolling out. It has to be cost-effective; we would need the IT infrastructure to support satellite printing as would the printers. We would need the printer network. There is a lot of infrastructure that needs to happen before that is realized.
Q. What are some of the challenges to more fully adopting digital book printing?
A. There are two different ways to fully adopt digital. We can adopt digital as an alternate to offset printing. That’s just a matter of expanding our digital printing program so that, as titles that are eligible come up, we can move them to the digital platform. But we also need to be nimble enough with our vendors and with ourselves to go in and out of digital. It may go from offset to digital. Or if the author dies, for instance, we may want to do an offset printing [run], so we have to be nimble enough to go back. That’s one part of digital printing.
Then there is the hub or satellite printing, and to realize that it’s the infrastructure on both the printer side and publisher side.
Q. Do you currently have the relationship with you printers where you can go from offset to digital and back to offset?
A. We do, but it’s not as seamless as we’d like it. There is still a bit of hand holding to go back and forth. But we’re getting better at it. The more we do it, the better we get.
Q. Five years from now, what will digital printing’s role be at PRH?
A. I hope that we won’t really be talking about it as much since it’s part of what we do. It’s part of our offering as a publisher, and it becomes commonplace. It really shouldn’t be a novelty at that point, and it should become an everyday practice. PI
About the Author
Ellen Harvey serves as associate/digital editor of Book Business and Publishing Executive, two sister brands to Printing Impressions.
Ellen Harvey is a freelance writer and editor who covers the latest technologies and strategies reshaping the publishing landscape. She previously served as the Senior Editor at Publishing Executive and Book Business.
