Hewlett-Packard Co.

INTERQUEST, a leading market and technology research and consulting firm serving the digital printing and publishing industry, today announced a 30 percent increase in attendance at its 2010 digital book event held each year for the past five years at the Publishing Business Expo in New York City.

In the past 10 years, the time required to produce a hardcover book has shrunk from six to eight weeks to as little as seven days. While major efficiency improvements have occurred in the world of offset printing, most of this astonishing contraction in time and cost has occurred thanks to digital printing technology.

Book manufacturers have been moving in a “green” direction for several years, giving more thought to conservation and the use of recycled materials. Lately, as book publishers and consumers have increasingly been expecting such practices, the green movement has taken on new momentum.

Imagine this scenario: A pallet of books arrives at a distributor’s warehouse. It is scanned, allowing the system to keep track of the location of every book as the shipment is robotically de-palletized, stored and machine-prepared for shipment to retailers. Arriving at the point of sale, cartons are scanned at the door and all contents entered instantly into inventory, with special-order customers notified automatically that their book has arrived. Customers and employees can then discover with the click of a mouse exactly where a book is located in the store, and inventory, even at the largest bookstores, takes no more than 20 minutes.

PublicAffairs, an imprint of The Perseus Books Group, recently found itself with an enviable problem—not enough books to fill orders for a runaway best-seller. The book was Scott McClellan’s White House memoir “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” but luckily for Perseus, the appearance of McClellan’s face everywhere on TV this spring coincided with a propitious meeting at BookExpo America between John Ingram of Ingram Book Group, owner of digital printer Lightning Source, and Perseus Publisher Peter Osnos. “Demand went vertical, and there was a period of time when orders were coming in and they [didn’t have] any

Ten years ago, digital, ondemand book printing officially burst upon the scene at Book-Expo America. With IBM’s roll-fed and Xerox’s sheet-fed equipment producing books on the show fl oor in Chicago, Ingram (then Lightning Print) and Bertelsmann (through OPM) invited the industry to get on board while the train was at the station. Since then, Lighting Print has transformed into Lightning Source, a subsidiary of Ingram Industries and the nation’s largest 24/7 book-at-a-time printer. Book and journal manufacturer Edwards Brothers, which had also been operating a one-off DocuTech service for some years before 1998, has expanded its reach and now has seven satellite digital

Charlottesville, Va. (February 15, 2008)–—INTERQUEST, a leading market and technology research and consulting firm serving the digital printing and publishing industry, and Book Business magazine, the leading trade publication for book printing and publishing as well as producer of the Publishing Business Conference and Expo, today announced an impressive and wide-ranging line-up of speakers for the Digital Book Printing Forum, which will be held Tuesday, March 11, 2008, during the annual Publishing Business Conference and Expo at the New York Marriott Marquis Hilton in midtown Manhattan. According to INTERQUEST Director Toby Cobrin, “These speakers bring hands-on expertise and insight into all aspects of digital

Amazon bolstered its print-on-demand (POD) book division and consequently put the rest of the industry on notice that retail distribution is continuing to change, after it made a significant push to add new digital color presses to its operations. The leading online retailer would not publicly disclose the number of Hewlett-Packard (HP) presses that it purchased or the price paid, but said several HP Indigo presses and production manager controllers were installed and put into operation in a number of the company’s fulfillment centers, when the announcement was officially made in December 2006. Never Out of Stock The move is an effort to fulfill

Most publishers are relatively tone deaf to adversarial activist campaigns. And so far, large, mainstream publishers have been only lukewarm in their response to voluntary multi-stakeholder collations like the Green Press Initiative/EPA Resource Conservation Challenge, which is calling on publishers to improve their ecological footprint. But, it will be increasingly difficult to ignore the growing number of institutional investors that are calling for big business to address the sustainability challenge. Socially responsible investment funds and indexes that employ sustainability performance ratings now represent in excess of $2 trillion in holdings. The influence of these funds is rising as they are rapidly moving from

Book manufacturers and publishers used to squeeze each other to cut costs at the other's expense. Now they are cutting costs together in partnerships of convenience. Welcome to 2004. It's like 2003, only the recession's grip has lessened. Production managers continue to shave a penny here, save a dollar there, while keeping up hope that the vaunted recovery will hit their employer's slice of the book publishing industry soon. Meanwhile, large retail and bookstore chains are returning books by the truckload, according to industry regulars. This dilutes revenues and increases costs for the publishers, leaving them with diminished cash flow and pinched