Gene Therapy: Effective Digital Print Strategies

John Lacagnina, president and CEO of the ColorCentric Corp. in Rochester, N.Y., started his company in 2002 with the encouragement of industry people who saw a “perfect storm” in the coming together of several factors: the perfection of digital color printing, the Internet, digital photography and, as he puts it, “the promise of a zero-inventory, real-time, one-off production model.”

His plant now offers 300 different black-and-white and color products in any size book, printing thousands of different products a day, with real-time tracking of every job in process, a standard 48-hour turnaround and an optional 24-hour, same-day guarantee. A 250-page, black-and-white book with a four-color cover is printed, bound and trimmed in 30 seconds.

How Digital Print Impacts the Business Model
In my recent two-part series on workfl ow management (Book Business, February and March 2008), I described how various publishers large and small now design their workfl ow in order to accommodate diverse formats and sources of supply by strategies such as in-house printing, placing titles with printers offering offset and digital, and maintaining inventories with outsource POD printers.

Not included in the foregoing, but not to be overlooked, is a steady movement toward bringing back, in a realistic way, the “before its time” bookstore-, airport- and library-sited POD kiosk first introduced during the dotcom bubble. The leading contender in efforts to develop this market is the Espresso Book Machine.

The ultimate business benefit of incorporating digital print into a comprehensive manufacturing and distribution strategy is its impact on the bottom line. Factors that any publisher, large or small, can lay out in a comparison chart concern where, in the life of the book, the demand is such that it is more profitable to maintain inventory; or, when demand is diminished or geographically diffused, that it is more profitable to pay more per unit and print after the sale.