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Printers generally like to talk about investments they’ve made in print technologies—offset or digital. Perhaps that’s because it suggests they’re doing well and that they’re investing in their customers’ businesses. Besides, talking about a slick, new machine that requires little to no makeready time and gets up to color with minimal effort is sexy. Well, comparatively speaking. The clunkier “back-office” equipment found in the typical finishing department is perhaps not as provocative, but talk to most any book printer or trade binder, and they’ll likely confide that the bindery machines are the real workhorses. Indeed, investing in the bindery is just as important

We asked publishers: "What is your take on the future of e-books? What impact do you think they'll have on book publishing within a couple of years and on the way your company produces books?" John Calvano, editorial operations manager, Time Inc. Home Entertainment, New York City: "Of course, issues such as e-books and our company's impending merger with AOL create an 'open book' with regards to the digital asset of our content. Barring technological hurdles at present, our largely pictorial products are not as well suited for an e-book format as they are for a larger color screen. "They feasibly could be

by Molly Joss Getting into CTP can be a learning experience, as panelists at the BookTech '99 session "CTP Part Two: Economic Issues Roundtable" explained. Session speakers, who shared their experiences in detail, included --Jerry Charlton, director of customer technical services, Quebecor Books, Kingsport, TN --Deborah Jones, senior production manager, McGraw-Hill, School Division, New York City --Craig Yolitz, director, prepress department, the West Group, Eagan, MN --Mark M. Krahforst, manufacturing manager, Rodale Press Overall, panelists described the experience of venturing into CTP as a positive one. As speakers described their experiences, a unifying pattern emerged -- each company had moved slowly into it as

Maybe we have an answer to all our prepress problems. It's called PDF. That's short for Portable Document Format. It's Adobe's file format. It's not difficult to grasp the basic principles of what PDF is all about. But it takes more than the page I have here, so please go read our related stories, then come back. All done? Good. (OK, for those of you who hate to flip pages, you should at least know that a PDF file can be made from a PostScript file. PostScript is the final format of a file made with Adobe's PageMaker or Illustrator programs and Quark's QuarkXPress, among others.) So, you

by Tatyana Sinioukov Seybold Seminars program director Thad McIlroy, Arcadia House, highlights key issues of PDF workflows Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF), the new golden child of the publishing industry, was a hot topic at Seybold in San Francisco in September. As PDF workflows are being implemented in various ways by industry pioneers, many agree that PDF stands a very good chance of becoming the standard for digital workflows in the near future. PDF, says Thad McIlroy, president of the San Francisco-based Arcadia House and program director, Seybold Seminars, will have a profound impact on the efficiency and profitability of workflows. A major advantage