Dave Schanke

If there’s ever a good time to talk about the state of book distribution, this would be it. Right now, everyone is abuzz about changes occurring within the system thanks in part to the July release of Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.” Anderson, editor of Wired magazine, declares the demise of common culture and cites occurrences called “long-tailed distributions,” or distributions to a greater number of smaller markets, rather than one, big mass market. According to Anderson, this helps distributors since they are no longer cut off by bottlenecks of distribution, such as limited

For Banta's Dave Schanke, customization is key to outputting end-products that suit each publisher's bottom line. It's part of a quest to marry production efficiency with high technology. At Banta (www.banta.com), this market vice president of general publishing has a client that needs to customize covers for special projects. The publisher often prints a million books each press run with versioned imprints that may total a few hundred. Schanke says, "We have the ability to do a lot of cover changes in the course of a run. In a run of 800,000, 1,100 different changes are possible." At Commercial Printing Company (www.commercialprinting.com), President

For binding, it's not enough to be fast; it also has to be strong. That's why Muller Martini (www.mullermartini.com) teamed-up with digital printing provider Océ Printing Systems (www.oceusa.com). For the first time this year, Muller's AmigoDigital perfect-binding system linked to an Océ DemandStream 8090CX digital printing system with Hunkeler paper handling equipment. The result: A workflow that will produce commercial-quality paperback books in a single pass. "We maintain that quality quotient by incorporating into the AmigoDigital the same perfect binding techniques we use in our high-volume equipment," says Andrew J. Fetherman, manager of Muller Martini's Digital Finishing Division. Based on Muller Martini's

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