It’s been a truism for some time that traditional book publishing, with its long runs, warehousing costs, unpredictable  demand, and returned inventory is a model that is increasingly untenable. One solution was for publishers to turn to offshore printing in place like China, but that only works in selected book markets where timing is not a critical issue. Publishers need a system where they can print what they need, when they need, so they can cuts their costs and align production with demand. Web inkjet presses seem to be filling that niche. 

In this issue we take an in-depth look at the first installation in Canada of the HP T300 inkjet web press at Webcom, one of the largest book printers in the country. Mike Collinge, CEO, says the company looked at the machine for about a year and a half before signing on the dotted line. His aim is to give book printers exactly what they’ve been asking for in terms of shorter runs at economical costs. See what he has to say on pg. 19. HP said it had about 20 presses either functioning or being installed worldwide at the end of October. Most are printing books or transpromo documents.

In early November several North American editors and analysts, including Graphic Monthly, visited Offset Paperback Manufacturers in Pennsylvania, a roughly $350 million book printer which has become the first to add a Kodak Prosper 5000XL to its facilities. It already had the monochrome model—the Prosper 1000. The colour device has replaced three toner machines and is working in tandem with the Muller Martini finishing line.

The Kodak inkjet press had been highly anticipated product that was initially shown as a technology demo at Drupa 2008. It too is carving a niche in book printing, and Kodak says it has about nine machines ready to deploy around the world.

What both these printers are hoping to be able to offer their customers is a new model for publishing books. They can print short runs economically, they do away with inventory costs, reduce waste, and the machines function like virtual warehouses where the file can be called up quickly. When publishers can do shorter runs, they actually place more orders, it turns out. OPM expects to produce up to a billion and a half pages a year on the Prosper. But the presses also open up the opportunity to reprint books that have been out of print for some time and, according to staff at OPM even take back some of the four-colour work that had been lost to China.

The accepted figure is that digital books currently account for anywhere between 6% to 9% of total book production in North America, a figure that OPM confirmed for its own operations. As prices drop—and right now the quoted price per page is .08¢—that share is expected to grow at a pretty good clip.