We are painting ourselves into a corner
Magazines Canada, an industry group with a mandate to promote magazines as an advertising medium, recently held an all-day session in Toronto called “Dare to go digital.” The event brought together production managers from various magazines. The day’s main topic of discussion was how to convert magazine production to computer-to-plate and live to tell the story.
CTP is the latest buzz word in the magazine industry. Many publishers and production managers are moving to CTP and many more are considering it.
I was asked to sit on the panel partly because I am from the printing industry, and also because Graphic Monthly itself recently switched to a CTP workflow, so I could provide perspective from both sides. The other individuals on the panel were production managers who had taken, or were in the process of taking, their magazines over to a computer-to-plate workflow. The discussion centered around the problems encountered during the conversion process. Particular attention was focused on how to convert advertisers to one useable standard, ie., PDF, TIFF/IT or whatever works.
What really threw me about the discussions was the impression that there would be tremendous cost savings on printing once a magazine had fully converted to CTP. The production manager of a well-known consumer magazine, for example, even stood up and said publishers should expect at least 5% to 10% off their total printing bill once a magazine embraces a digital workflow.
Unfortunately, at least one group of printing customers—magazines, which buy a lot of printing a year—has the mistaken impression that if a printer offers compute-to-plate, big price reductions will naturally flow to customers.
If it were only that simple. As we have repeatedly shown in articles and interviews with printers who have CTP systems (see the August 2001 issue) costs do not disappear once a shop forsakes film. While CTP systems and digital proofing costs are coming down, they are still not cheap. If you factor in the obsolescence cost of the platesetters and other boxes, you’re talking significant dollars. The price tag on CTP plates is still more than the savings realized by eliminating film and other material costs.
There are some real cost savings to be had by going digital or by adopting electronic stripping instead of mechanical stripping. But just because a printer outputs to a CTP system instead of a 4-up or 8-up imagesetter does not mean his costs have dramatically decreased. If customers start expecting big price reductions we could be in for trouble. In the case of the magazine production manager, she was talking of her entire printing bill being reduced up to 10%. I doubt that at her magazine, which is run on a heatset web, the prepress costs are even 10% of the total costs.
The real big danger here is that if we printers start selling computer-to-plate applications to customers as a big cost-savings procedure, we are going to have to give up some of our margins on the actual printing, (ie., putting ink on paper) and bindery. Selling CTP on higher quality, speed, including time savings, and flexibility makes a lot of sense. But the industry has to be able to recover the costs of computer-to-plate systems and the associated obsolescence costs.
What has always been true in this industry is true now: if you sell on price you paint yourself into a corner with no profits.
Alexander Donald is the publisher of Graphic Monthly Canada.