One of the reasons for this success has been that a few technically aware forward thinking book publishers have realised that this technology can change the established book publishing and production model used by publishers for generations. Up to now we have had digital book printing for very short run print on demand books using monochrome sheet fed and continuous feed toner based digital presses, predominantly from Oce, Ricoh Infoprint and Xerox. This technology has been too expensive for run lengths beyond around 500 copies, and is almost exclusively used for reprints or personal publishing.
Recently I met with Ed Febinger, Corporate VP of Manufacturing & Inventory Management of Pearson, one of the world’s most progressive publishers. Pearson’s business is predominantly in educational books, travel books (Dorling Kindersley) and newspapers. It is interesting to look at Ed Febinger’s business title covering inventory management. This is one of the major problems for publishers in terms of defining how many books to print and how long to store unsold books. Febinger saw the opportunity when he met with HP at Drupa in 2008 having previously seen the T300 press.
After Drupa Febinger took a data file with a number of Pearson’ books in it and asked all the digital press suppliers to print a book for him. From this he concluded at this time that the HP T300 press best fitted the Pearson model in terms of print quality, flexibility, running cost and offset substitution. From that time Pearson has worked with a number of printers who have introduced the HP press and have produced a large number of books.
Febinger indicated that publishers are going through a major period of change. The arrival of E-Readers has opened up a new publisher area, the benefits of which to the publisher is no decision has to be made concerning run length and inventory. This is meaning that publishers are now thinking of shorter print run lengths as a standard. Febinger also indicated that publishers work to the 80/20 rule where, 80 per cent of books make 20 per cent of the profits.
In this situation a large proportion of this 80 per cent sell less than 1,500 copies so digital printing is an ideal substitution for this. So far sales of E-Books have not really affected Pearson as such books are predominately in the fiction space. With the increasing success of the iPad as an E-Reader Febinger sees that E-Books will move into the education and travel space where colour is a necessity.
Unfortunately most book publishers, particularly those outside of the US do not have the progressive view of Pearson. Most publishers only appear to work on the cost of unit production of a book and not take account of inventory and scrapage costs. Febinger indicated that for the future publishers have to work on total cost of production and print shorter more economical run lengths with the potential of cheaper reprints when a book is seen to be profitable.
At this time most of this new production from progressive book publishers takes place on HP T300 presses. Kodak however have installed both Prosper 1000 monochrome and Prosper 5000 Colour presses at OPM, and Screen has a TruepressJet 520 at King Printing alongside an HP T300.
I would expect that from 2011 other publishers will see the success of Pearson and other leading publishers that are changing their business models, and under preside from E-Book sales will switch to looking at total book costs rather than unit production costs.
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