The Full 360 on Digital

Bauer: One of the things we've observed is that many of the promises and claims made by digital print manufacturers to publishers were difficult to bring to fruition.

Booktech: What were some of those promises?

Bauer: The profitability of keeping books in print, impacting the returns issue, better inventory management. Those things were promised over the last decade. Whether it's a trade or education publisher or what-have-you, those [promises] have been very difficult to bring to fruition. But over the last three years, the products and digital presses have changed. Those [new] technologies have started to make [digital print] more of a financially viable solution. The impact of those changes are mainly addressing press speeds and roll widths, and delivering a cost platform that now makes sense for publishers to transact at lower volumes. Before, [digital print] wasn't effective printing below 500. When trying to place orders below 500, and you bring in the other transaction costs, [digital print] simply didn't make sense. As the technologies have become faster, and able to deliver 1000 or 1200 units, now it's at a lower price than the equivalent offset. That's starting to make [digital print] viable for publishers.