Gene Therapy: Effective Digital Print Strategies

One of the chief barriers to going full-steam ahead is that the manufacturing industry hasn’t systemically fully integrated digital with traditional offset. As a consequence, most publishers who have embraced digital strategies are building relationships with different digital printers alongside their conventional offset printers.

While buyers have always spread their business among several printers in order to assure sources of supply during peaks and valleys, and also to take advantage of different printing or finishing capabilities, the big difference in this instance is that the same title now gets placed with different vendors—not only for printtoinventory and print-to-order, but also for electronic editions. This imposes a riskier quality-control requirement on the publisher in regard to consistency in the outcome for content, format, press work and image reproduction.

At the Digital Book Printing Forum held at the 2008 Publishing Business Conference & Expo last month in New York City, Tom Willshire, vice president of sales and marketing, Continuum International Publishing Group, addressed how digital print fits into a comprehensive content management strategy. Continuum’s multichannel, multiformat program provides a good case study on the value of virtual warehousing print-to-order in multiple locations as a way to limit returns, handling and lost orders.

Print Quality Issues Largely Resolved
A major concern among professional production managers and print buyers has been print quality—lay of the pigment on the paper surface, sharpness of typographic reproduction and halftone quality. It is generally conceded that digital print provides black-and-white reproduction indistinguishable from offset to the reader’s eye. Color is not far behind and, in many cases, superior.

The primary constraint lies in the limitations on grades of paper that equipment manufacturers will certify as acceptable under their maintenance contracts. This, it is reported, has also limited the adoption pace in the digital print market of recycled papers.