Say goodbye to books
Digitisation is being heralded as the biggest change to the print industry since the invention of the printing press
Thursday, March 18 2010 || News || BY Lesley Springall
The digitisation of the print industry is being heralded by some as the biggest change since Johannes Gutenberg introduced the printing press in the late fifteenth century. And now Ligare, a 30 year veteran of the print industry and Australia’s self-professed short-run, digital print leader is opening an on-demand commercial printing business in Auckland this month.
“The old days of a publisher sitting around a smoke-filled boardroom table saying ‘let’s print 20,000 of these,’ are gone,” says Cliff Brigstocke, chief executive of Opus Print Group, which owns Ligare. Today university lecturers don’t want marketing texts pushing US examples like Chrysler or Starbucks, they want material that’s relevant to their classes, he says. “We’re now in a world where those texts can be customised by a lecturer right down to his or her class size.”
The US is leading the way in digital print. The much lauded Espresso Book Machine, launched in 2007, which prints books-on-demand in small bookshops, cafés and libraries, from well known texts to more than 2 million out of copyright books scanned by Google, was developed by the New York-based On Demand Books. But Australia and New Zealand are also ahead of the game, says Joan Grace, PrintNZ chief executive. New Zealand has always done shorter print runs, because of its size, so it’s been heading towards digitisation for a while, she says, but it’s only now that the technology has reached a stage where it’s affordable.
Steve Messenger of Wellington’s Astra Print has recently shipped in the latest in commercial “web-fed inkjet” digital printers. “It’s about changing the old inventory based model, where a publisher, a distributor and a retailer have all got chunks of just-in-case inventory there.” In the US about 30% of books are returned to the publisher to be pulped. That’s tens of millions of dollars wasted every year, says Messenger. “That sort of waste just can’t be sustained.”
It’s also been driving interest in electronic book readers, like Amazon’s Kindle, Sony Readers and most recently Apple’s iPad, he says. “So the printed book market has to respond by getting the price of a book much closer to an e-book, and the only way to do that is by reducing the waste in the supply chain.”
Just as Google is intent on digitising every book ever written to counter Amazon’s hold on the industry, university printing houses like the Cambridge University Press are also digitising their stock, and handing their inventory lists to print-on-demand printers, so they can keep “out of print” titles in print.
Taking over publishers’ back catalogues is one of the group’s key growth plans, admits Brigstocke. It already lists Pearson Education as customer. Digitisation has also allowed one of its legal publishing clients to slice and dice much of its information and tailor it to more specialised audiences, increasing sales among niche groups, he says.
But digitisation doesn’t mean the end for traditional long-run, offset printers. There’s always going to be the blockbusters - the Harry Potters - of this world, the Woman’s Weekly titles and packaging for best sellers like Weetbix, says Grace. “But their space will be commoditised and they’ll have to operate in a more lower cost world,” says Brigstocke.
Messenger says few Kiwi printers have made the digital transition to date because of the money invested in traditional print technology. “The technology has changed so rapidly that the things you can buy today weren’t practical when you made your last investment decision four years ago.” The industry is in transformation, he says. “But there are still a lot of people who are hoping things will come right, instead of recognising there has been a fundamental shift in the requirements of buyers and there needs to be a fundamental shift in the response of the printers.”
