Ricoh Americas Corp.

With the expansion of the smartphone market, mobile seems poised to fulfill its promise as the next great frontier in publishing.

Boulder, Colo., June 14, 2010—InfoPrint Solutions Company, a joint venture between IBM and Ricoh, today announced that Frederic Printing, a Consolidated Graphics (NYSE:CGX) company in Aurora, Colo., has acquired the market-leading InfoPrint 5000 inkjet production system to enable the printing of high-quality print on-demand (POD) textbooks, direct mail pieces and election ballots.

At one time, many book publishers printed their own books. Then they discovered that the cost of maintaining a printing enterprise was less cost-effective than buying book printing and binding from commercial printers. Over the decades, they dabbled in (photo) typesetting and desktop publishing, and enlisted legions of part-time workers. At some moment in time, most books in production in New York City are on the subway, as industry freelancers carry manuscripts and artwork back and forth.

Ten years ago, digital, ondemand book printing officially burst upon the scene at Book-Expo America. With IBM’s roll-fed and Xerox’s sheet-fed equipment producing books on the show fl oor in Chicago, Ingram (then Lightning Print) and Bertelsmann (through OPM) invited the industry to get on board while the train was at the station. Since then, Lighting Print has transformed into Lightning Source, a subsidiary of Ingram Industries and the nation’s largest 24/7 book-at-a-time printer. Book and journal manufacturer Edwards Brothers, which had also been operating a one-off DocuTech service for some years before 1998, has expanded its reach and now has seven satellite digital