At last night’s Galley Club post drupa event it was concluded that hybrid technology is the way of the future for book and print publishing.
The printing and publishing members’ organisation gathered at Sydney’s Occidental Hotel to hear presentations from SOS Printing’s Michael Schultz, Carrick Wilkie from Opus Group and Owen Mosert from Hewlett-Packard on the latest trends shown at drupa.
Although the talks focused heavily on digital which took centre stage at the mega trade show, Wilkie told the crowd, “You have to embrace old technology with the new, which is known as hybrid.”
Hybrid was explained as the process where digital technology is used in combination with offset.
However Schultz also used the term to refer to the collaboration between manufacturers, as seen at drupa with KBA and Xerox co-developing a B1 sheetfed digital folding carton press, the VariJet 106.
Schultz explained, “At drupa there was a lot of hybrid solutions where manufacturers from different fields worked together to find and present solutions.”
During his presentation, Schultz also spruiked inkjet technology, saying, “It was everywhere and everybody was exhibiting a new iteration of the inkjet press. There was one from Kodak, several from Xerox and Konica Minolta, and many of these were webfed for high productivity and high speed.”
Mosert’s presentation explored digital technology in the publishing market and highlighted key trends in custom books, print on demand and the digitisation of newspapers.
“We found a big requirement for the custom book, especially in the education market where people wanted different content from different publications all merged into one book, digital allows you to do that,” Mosert said.
“And with warehouses around the world taking up tons of space, print on demand is becoming very important. With newspapers, we found that this is a market which is driving itself more towards digital.”
After the presentations, Schultz, Mosert and Wilkie fielded questions from the audience, where it was agreed that drupa 2016 could be summed up with one word, connectivity.
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