The December Issue Book Business featured the re-launch of the Top 20 Book Manufacturers, a ranking that lists the largest book manufacturers in the U.S. and Canada by revenue. To accompany that ranking, we interviewed top printing executives to find out how the printing industry has changed and the issues they think publishers should be most mindful of in the future. Printing experts shared insights on digital printing, minimizing supply chain costs, and integrating publisher and printer systems. The Q&As we published in the December issue were just snapshots, but following you'll find the full-length interview with Michael Shea, VP of Courier Corporation.
What are some of the trends that you've seen emerge in book printing over the past few years?
It's kind of interesting. There has been so much talk about everything going digital, particularly in the textbook market. Textbooks are an area of focus and expertise for us. For years publishers have said that we're going to digital delivery, the book is going away, but we've printed more books last year than we ever have. The K-12 market had a great recovery last year. We had some modest growth in higher ed as well. We're expecting another big year next year.
Despite the talk in the media about going digital, print still remains very strong. Having said that, I understand that there will be a move to digital and that there will be more content delivered digitally. What we're seeing and what we think will be a very successful model is more of a hybrid approach. Content that belongs in digital format -- video, animation, assessment -- will be in digital, but there are a lot of core material that studies are showing are better digested by students in print. There are many studies being published now indicating that print is a great medium for a lot of educational material.
Where we're seeing folks being very successful is creating interactive books. My team has developed an interactive textbook app where we're linking rich media content to interactive icons that are printed in the book. As the student is going through a workbook or a textbook, they reach a spot where the publisher has some interactive material. It could be a video; It could be a gallery of additional photos; It could be an assessment. We're seeing a big surge in tying printed material into the online complimentary assets. We think that will continue to grow.
What are some new ways that publishers should be looking to their printers as partners, and how are you working with publishers differently than perhaps you have in the past?
There are a number of different ways that Courier works with our customers. Part of it is the new inkjet book manufacturing process. The introduction of inkjet manufacturing into the book market has opened up a huge opportunity for us and for publishers. Historically the quality and cost of toner-based digital reproduction was too expensive. It would be cheaper for publishers to overprint the quantity of offset books and throw away what they didn't need. With inkjet, we're able to do up to 1,200 copies with four-color and several hundred copies with one-color. The quality is commercially acceptable and the price point is significantly less than offset.
To support this inkjet initiative we developed an automated workflow. We like to use the term "Made to Order," or MTO. The term POD has been a confusing term for our industry for a number of years. Some people think of it as short-run digital works, some think of it as one-offs. From our perspective it's an automated workflow. Don't print a book that you know you're not going to sell. Orders come into us electronically, we're manufacturing to order, and we direct ship it to their customer and supplying confirmation back to them so that they can do the billing. It's very automated and streamlined, but it's allowing publishers to significantly reduce costs in the warehouse and eliminate double shipments.
And has automation sped up your turnaround time?
Yes, very much so. Most of our digital work ships in less than two weeks. A typical offset schedule may be three to four weeks, depending on the time of the year. With inkjet we can ship in less than two weeks, and often in less than a week.
The other piece is there is a great opportunity to increase revenues by bringing titles back into print. Previously they may have taken a title that only sold 100 or 200 copies a year, and rather than trying to manage that title they put it out of print. Now they can affordably create that title through automated workflows and inkjet. It's now profitable.
Have publishers largely adopted inkjet?
We're not seeing any hesitation from textbook publishers. The only area where we see some resistance, and that is fading, is in some of the trade markets. Some of the high coverage titles printed on gloss paper can get a little difficult for inkjet manufacturing. Other than that we're not finding any resistance. Our inkjet platform is a 6 billion page a year platform. It's a massive platform.
What should publishers be thinking about regarding their printing in 2015?
We've talked a little bit about the hybrid book where content is presented in the best form for the student. Publishers should leverage some of these interactive apps so that students can get material in the best way for them. Scanning a photo or icon in a textbook using an iPhone or iPad is something we think will grow a lot. We've done a lot of work in this area and built software to support this interactivity. I think that will be the next big thing that is going to happen -- the hybrid delivery of content.
The other trend I think is important is the increase in custom publishing. We have a large custom publishing platform that allows our customers to leverage a lot of their existing content. Instead of going out and creating new titles by hand and repurposing in a manual way, we have some tools that allow customers to create custom material via a web interface and repurpose their existing content. We've seen great growth in custom publishing and we think that will continue in years to come.
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- Michael Shea
Ellen Harvey is a freelance writer and editor who covers the latest technologies and strategies reshaping the publishing landscape. She previously served as the Senior Editor at Publishing Executive and Book Business.