Book Business EXTRA! Q&A -- Xerox’s New Technology Helps Customize Teaching Materials Digitally

Xerox rolls out a new digital production product this weekend at Graph Expo 2006--it’s one that the company expects will change the way teacher’s editions of textbooks are produced. Incorporating a combination of a press retrofit and new software, school districts across the country will now have the ability to pick what content goes into their version of the teacher’s textbook to help meet the “No Child Left Behind” legislation at a much lower price. Printers will be able to produce the books more quickly and at a much lower cost, too. Tracy Yelencsics, manager of Production Color Marketing for Xerox’s Production Systems Group, chats with Book Business EXTRA! about the new offering.

Book Business EXTRA! -- Has there been much interest in this type of product?

Tracy Yelencsics -- We actually came up with this solution because our customers were asking for it. As we worked with various publishers, this came up as an opportunity. We think there will be a great interest in doing this.

At Mercury Print (Book Division in Rochester, N.Y.), they reduced prepress setup time from 30 hours to 30 minutes. It’s just incredible. They were our initial test customer.

EXTRA! -- From a production standpoint, will this technology save printers money?
Yelencsics -- Absolutely. In the past, what happened was that for each state there is a different book--even for each school district. There were several skilled employees who would pull the pages out of a PDF repository, manually bring these together and send them to the printer. Then they would manually collate the books. That’s tons of manual labor. ...With the new process, you basically have one operator. It’s an integration, with lightweight papers, to create a custom teacher’s edition book that has each page that can be customized for each state. ... It calls out and assembles that book for Pennsylvania, [for example] and creates a completely collated book.