Courier Corp.

Courier Corporation (Nasdaq: CRRC), one of America's leading innovators in book manufacturing, publishing and content management, announced today that it has received a non-binding, unsolicited proposal from R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company (Nasdaq: RRD) to acquire the Company for $23.00 per share in cash or RR Donnelley common stock, subject to proration in the event that shareholders elect to receive more than approximately 49% cash or more than approximately 51% stock. The RR Donnelley proposal is subject to, among other things, various closing conditions, Courier shareholder approval and regulatory approvals.

Quad/Graphics, Inc. (NYSE: QUAD) ("Quad/Graphics" or the "Company") and Courier Corporation (Nasdaq: CRRC) ("Courier") jointly announced a definitive agreement by which Quad/Graphics will acquire Courier, a leading innovator in book manufacturing, publishing and content management. The acquisition accelerates Quad/Graphics' three-year strategy to transform its book platform, which the Company announced earlier this week.

Book publishers are not alone in their attempts to adapt and thrive in a new digital era. Since the introduction of the ebook, printers have faced a radically different industry, one in which print demand has slowed and publishers seek the efficiencies of digital production and distribution. Printers have been forced, much like publishers, to reassess their value in the industry, be more nimble, and find new ways to cut costs and improve efficiencies.

When Penguin and Random House joined forces last year, the publishers brought together 10,000 jobs, 250 independent imprints, and $3.7 billion in annual revenues. The merged publisher left vague how it would handle combining two very distinct logos with long-running literary traditions.

The solution announced on Tuesday is an elegant, inclusive, and understated two-part branding system. Rather than choosing either a previous logo or trying to come up with something new, Penguin Random House will exist as a wordmark spelling out the company's name-think Coca-Cola (KO) or GE (GE)

North Chelmsford, MA, October 28, 2013-Courier Corporation (Nasdaq: CRRC), one of America's leading innovators in book manufacturing, publishing and content management, today announced plans to bring its pioneering technology for the production of customized textbooks to Brazil.

By acquiring FastPencil, a developer of end-to-end, cloud-based content management technology in Campbell, CA, Courier Corp. will build on its leadership in content management and customization for educational publishers, while bringing a comparable offering to a broader market.

The six major annual book design shows listed above continue to anchor our industry in its traditions of craft, even though painfully unadorned ebooks and cluttered multimedia platforms proceed apace, charting their own course. Whatever the wide range of book show presenting criteria, as shown in the survey that follows, ultimately the purpose of book design is to enhance the readability and message of the book itself. 

Print will survive and thrive in those areas where it continues to fulfill that purpose. Where digital media prevail, irrepressible design aspirations will soon follow.

While some shows are beginning to provide digital edition categories (mostly fixed format and multi-media), print editions continue to be foundational platforms for book design and organization — at least for the time being. Leading edge designers are exploring ways to bring design criteria into the reflowable formats.

We know that books printed digitally have tended to be, like the old stitch about newspapers, black and white and read all over. For most of digital printing's existence, producing professional four-color books just wasn't possible; you had to use offset. But the times they are a-changing, and technological advances are making the production of full-color books in longer short runs more feasible and economical than ever before. The advent of sheetfed digital printing brought us the ability to print full-color books in very short runs—it was responsible for opening up the high-growth photo book market. Now "4-up" and roll-fed "printer/presses" are further changing the full-color publishing paradigm.

Before we go further, let's define some terms, as printers are, in essence, quite different from presses. Printers regenerate the impression for each copy from a digital file, which allows them to use electronic collation and print the pages of a book block in order. Presses, on the other hand, use a physical image carrier (a plate) to reproduce large printed sheets which are folded into signatures, gathered and bound. But printers become, in essence, presses when either the sheet size or output speed starts to approach the specs of an analog reproduction device (aka a press). A "printer/press" is my term for printers that have many characteristics of a press.

Digital printing has saved the book industry. The old business model that printed an excess of books has been replaced for many titles by a more efficient on-demand model. Consider my personal example: Back in 1972, I wanted to self-publish a book. I only wanted 500 copies, but the printer said the minimum run was 5,000. I still have 4,000 copies in the warehouse, because someone may want a book on 1970s phototypesetting some day.

An energized Publishing Business Conference and Expo, Book Business and Publishing Executive magazines’ annual event at the Times Square Marriott Marquis, March 19-21, was grounded in optimism and realism, and primed for a promising future in the digital age for book manufacturing and print-based book production.

Addressing the overflow audience at the Marriott's Astor Ballroom, our very own Joan of Arc at the ramparts, Editorial Director Noelle Skodzinski—fully armed with the arguments of comon sense and history to support her—sounded a much-needed balancing and defiant keynote to prevailing “stiff upper lip” scenarios about the decline of the publishing industry. She reminded us, paraphrasing from both Monty Python and the Holy Grail and the Encyclopedia Britannica blog’s notice that it had discontinued its venerable print edition, that publishing is not dead, change is okay, and that the future is alive with new opportunities in our pursuit of continued success and excellence in the publishing business.