Lightning Source Inc.

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

Printers generally like to talk about investments they’ve made in print technologies—offset or digital. Perhaps that’s because it suggests they’re doing well and that they’re investing in their customers’ businesses. Besides, talking about a slick, new machine that requires little to no makeready time and gets up to color with minimal effort is sexy. Well, comparatively speaking. The clunkier “back-office” equipment found in the typical finishing department is perhaps not as provocative, but talk to most any book printer or trade binder, and they’ll likely confide that the bindery machines are the real workhorses. Indeed, investing in the bindery is just as important

The biggest news in book retailing so far this year may be Borders’ opening its first “concept store,” a new generation of superstores unveiled in February in the company’s hometown of Ann Arbor, Mich. At 28,900 square feet, the new store—the first of 14 planned to open this year—does not skimp on size, and a lot of that space is taken up by innovative features: shop-within-a-shop “destination zones” for travel, cooking, wellness, graphic novels and children’s categories; bold, new architectural designs; and a “digital center” offering services ranging from book downloading to self-publishing. “Our mission is to be a headquarters for knowledge

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

According to one of the better-known accounts in the compendium of humankind’s greatest achievements, it was in the year 105 that a Chinese man named Ts’ai Lun invented paper, mashing up wood from a mulberry tree with fiber from bamboo. Thus was born a technology that would literally change the world, making possible artistic, scientific and religious revolutions, democratizing literacy and learning, and ushering humanity into the modern age. In recent times, paper production has played a role in changing the world in other ways. The book industry alone required 3 million to 4 million tons of paper over just the last three years,

Book-production management is, in many respects, an act of faith. For some, faith in the universality of Murphy’s Law—if something can go wrong, it will. Or, faith that virtue is its own reward—if you do everything right, things will always come out right. Old hands come to realize that “trust but verify” is probably the most prudent maxim to apply in managing workflow. Without systems in place and proven procedures, we’d have to reinvent the wheel every time. But without an occasional revisit to the last batch of XBIT transactions or Job Definition Format (JDF) specifications sent through, that error in the PMS color

“We are leading the pack by building a digital warehouse, which is the digital equivalent of our print warehouse,” commented Jane Friedman, president and CEO of HarperCollins Publishers, in the May issue of Book Business. This is the ultimate sign-off on the industry’s embrace of the future, and its take-back of content control from trailblazers such as Google, Amazon and Yahoo. For some years now, various technology vendors have enabled publishers to deliver electronically formatted versions of their titles for special purposes. These have included applications such as conversions to XML formats (e.g., Publishing Dimensions), proprietary e-book reader formats (Mobipocket), sight-impaired applications (National

If distribution means getting books into the hands of sellers, circulators or readers, then a true profile of the distribution business would cast a wide net, beginning at the binding line and continuing through to the ‘long tail’ of online portals, used bookstores and curbside pushcarts. However, if distribution, from the publisher’s view, means getting books to generate sales revenue, we can overlook all of the aftermarket, recirculation and reselling channels and focus solely on reaching stores, libraries, online and catalog warehouses and—increasingly, thanks to the Internet—direct marketing from the publisher to the consumer. In the article “Deconstructing Distribution,” in Book Business’

At the 18th Annual Galaxy British Book Awards ceremony in London, Lightning Source UK—a subsidiary of La Vergne, Tenn.-based Lightning Source Inc., a provider of digital publishing support and print on demand services—was honored with the Nielsen Bookdata Award for Innovation in the Book Industry. The company was recognized for the success of its Pilot Large Print Initiative, which makes books available on-demand in large-print format for the visually impaired. The initiative is the first of its kind in the publishing industry. “We’re absolutely delighted to win the award for innovation in the book industry,” said David Taylor, senior vice-president of global sales for