Digital Printing
Digital printers try to shed the ‘digital’ differentiation from offset, and stress the value of short-run in any book’s life cycle. Plus, a list of 20 leading North American digital book printers
August 2008 By James Sturdivant“Demand went vertical, and there was a period of time when orders were coming in and they [didn’t have] any copies … [available] anywhere,” says Lightning Source President David Taylor. “So John Ingram said to Peter Osnos, ‘Look, give us the file, and we’ll set it up as an on-demand model, and we’ll fulfill at least some of those orders.’ ”
The problem for Perseus became an opportunity for Ingram to show the world the value of on-demand digital printing.
“We got the file from them on the Monday morning after BookExpo America, and we were printing the first books that afternoon,” Taylor recounts. “We actually moved over our entire casebook production to just that book for a period of 48 hours. We printed several thousand copies, and those were orders that otherwise would have just [been lost] or would have not been fulfilled. When the offset order came back in, we switched it off.”
Printing What You Need When You Need It
Taylor hopes examples like this one demonstrate the versatility of digital printing, both in terms of logistics (speed of turnaround) and printing capabilities (“What Happened” is a hardback, jacketed book with photo plates in the middle). Driven by recent technological improvements, falling production costs and a changing book market, digital printers believe their services are on the cusp of playing a major role in all segments of book manufacturing.
“Digital is still very small today,” notes Gilles Biscos of market research and consulting firm Interquest. Between 2 percent and 3 percent of total book volume is produced digitally, Biscos says, though this is up from less than 2 percent two years ago. At current rates of growth, digital should be at 5 percent to 6 percent of the total market in three years, he predicts.
The most rapid growth in the on-demand market up to this point has come in nontraditional segments such as self-publishing. Lightning Source works with publishers such as Lulu.com to provide printing services in runs anywhere from one book to a few dozen; such business makes up about one-third of the company’s total volume, according to Biscos.
