Quebecor World Direct

Book editors, publicists, and marketers sent a collective "thank you" to media queen Oprah Winfrey, when the Association of American Publishers presented her with its AAP Honors award. The reason for the award: Oprah's Book Club, a wildly popular segment of The Oprah Winfrey Show. The segment routinely turned titles into bestsellers. But while publishers love the show's impact on revenues, dealing with massive, often unexpected surges in demand can vex even the most efficient supply chain. The format of Oprah's Book Club was simple and effective. Winfrey chose a novel, then broadcast a reader discussion and author interview. The first book featured: The

Dave Dunn's foray into book rescue and repair was the result of bad luck that inspired smart thinking. "I worked 16 years for Colonial Press. They were purchased by a holding company, then sold to another holding company. They decided they wanted to do automobile manufacturing and I didn't fit," explains Dunn. "I left with the thought that all the things that [Colonial Press] didn't want to do, I would do for all manufacturers. No one wants to do the things like shrink wrapping little pieces together. So, I started doing the labor intensive things that no one else wanted to do." Dunn's passion and

With a formal education in accounting and no previous publishing experience, Cheryl Horch began her career as a customer service representative for William C. Brown in 1990. The company's unique setup allowed Horch to learn the business from the ground up. Recently, her stellar career history was recognized by PrintMedia magazine (the North American Publishing sister publication to BookTech the Magazine), as Horch is slated to be inducted into the 2001 Production Executives' Hall of Fame. Although it was a publishing house, William C. Brown also had its own presses, and Horch worked for five years in manufacturing. After this stint in manufacturing,

In many ways, a marketplace is like a population of living organisms. With pressure, it evolves, and behavior changes. We've seen advances in communication technologies combine with a dynamic economy to alter consumer expectations. Services like on-demand, just-in-time and digital printing evolved to fill the niche provided by consumers' new-found need for speed. Players in the book space have been slow to adopt Internet print procurement solutions, but e-commerce companies are hopeful that the climate will change. E-procurement, in short, involves securing print services over the Internet via auction or other Web-enabled methodology. Companies like 58k.com focus almost exclusively on online auctioning. Others,

By Cheryl A. Adams To stay competitive in today's fast-paced business environment, book manufacturers are turning to the latest in digital printing/binding technology. Using such strategies, they can print on-demand books, soft- or hard-cover, quickly and cost effectively, without creating excess inventory. "When rapid delivery is expected with each order — especially in the non-inventory, e-commerce environment — automatic processes become critical," says Jim Augustine, vice president of national sales, Xyan.com, King of Prussia, Pa. Indeed, in today's digital short-run book market, automatic turnaround often isn't a problem. Not even for quantities of one and case-bound books. In as little as one minute, a

What if you had exactly three minutes to make a perfect picture -- well, good enough to eat -- before the garnish wilted, ice cream melted and the chicken breast turned gray? Indeed, art directors and photographers who work on cookbooks have their work cut out for them. But there's a payoff. They often get to eat the food they shoot -- if they don't mind, of course, that the strawberry shortcake spends a few minutes on the set first. Food photography So what do art directors and photographers do to make the image leap off the page and entice the reader's aesthetic senses? Traditionally, the tricks used

The Top 25 Book Manufacturers R.R. Donnelley & Sons, Chicago, continued its reign in 1999 as North America's leading book manufacturer, as measured by book printing sales volume. They remained at the top of the list even after Quebecor's acquisition last year of World Color Press, which propelled the combined company, Quebecor World, into the top slot among all commercial printers. Indeed, total sales for Quebecor World reached $6.16 billion in 1999, to R.R. Donnelley & Sons' $5 billion. However, when measured by book manufacturing revenue, Donnelley stays at the head of the pack, churning out high-volume bestsellers such as Tom Clancy's new book

1. R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company is the leading North American book printer. The company's book operations provide a full range of integrated service solutions to help book publishers deliver communications to their customers. With seven book operations across the nation, R.R. Donnelley provides services such as * hardcover and softcover book manufacturing using web-offset, sheetfed-offset and digital printing technology; * conventional and digital prepress operations, including composition and page makeup; * custom publishing and print on demand; * packaging design and assembly; and * online services, in which customers' digital information is converted into Web-ready formats. 2. Quebecor World is the largest commercial

Maybe we have an answer to all our prepress problems. It's called PDF. That's short for Portable Document Format. It's Adobe's file format. It's not difficult to grasp the basic principles of what PDF is all about. But it takes more than the page I have here, so please go read our related stories, then come back. All done? Good. (OK, for those of you who hate to flip pages, you should at least know that a PDF file can be made from a PostScript file. PostScript is the final format of a file made with Adobe's PageMaker or Illustrator programs and Quark's QuarkXPress, among others.) So, you