Lightning Source Inc., a subsidiary of Ingram Industries Inc., offers a package of digital fulfillment and printing services to the book industry. The company recently announced an upgrade of its manufacturing lines to include the new IBM Infoprint 4100 high-speed black & white digital printers, just one month after appointing a new Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, J. Kirby Best. The company has printed over five million books from its plant located in Tennessee.

WhatTheyThink spoke with Best to see how he was settling in to his new role, and to get a pulse on the latest from Lightning Source.

Topics in part one: See Part One
- Computer integrated manufacturing in book publishing
- 5 million books, working on 10 million
- The role of suppliers like HP Indigo, IBM & Muller Martini
- How Lightning connects with a publisher's workflow

Topics in part two:
- Why publishers print on-demand
- The “book life cycle”
- Allowing the backlist to live in perpetuity
- Outlook for Lightning & the book industry

WTT: What are some of the requirements you place on publishers in terms of form and format in order to maintain a streamlined publishing process? How receptive are publishers in general to changing their business processes to ultimately benefit from a books-on-demand strategy? What are some of the reasons they choose not to?

JKB: Years ago, I created a company that was the first totally digital, prepress printing company. We were dealing with 120 different word processing packages. Today, although those 120 are still out there, most people have focused on three or four different packages. The more focus given to an operation, the more streamlined an operation can become. The more streamlined we are, the higher quality and the lower prices we can achieve. So what are the requirements? While we try to put very few requirements on our customers, the more we can standardize, the better we’ll get. Lightning has spent a long time selling the on-demand concept to publishers. Today, the concept is proven and people are beginning to buy in. Now what we are doing is expanding and redefining the theory and the concept.

We find that there are two major reasons publishers print on-demand. If publishers are printing and selling less than 1,000 books a year on a title, POD is a natural option for them. It’s that less-than-1,000 books a year velocity that really turned me on to this - it is an exciting, definable moment that publishers can really buy into. When you are selling less than 1,000 books a year on a title, POD offers exponentially better returns versus normal offset, both in terms of risk and return on investment.

What are some of the reasons they choose not to? Trade publishers are constantly looking at what will be the next Tom Clancy or John Grisham, always looking forward. The books we originally positioned ourselves for were books at the tail end of the life cycle of the book. It is very important for us to get at the front end of the life cycle of a book, in addition to the tail end. If we can get at the front end of the life cycle, POD becomes an easy decision for publishers. The moment it drops below the 1,000 re-print or velocity a year curve, they just flip a switch and the book can go forever. The return is fabulous for them.

We are encouraged to see large publishers like Random House and Simon and Schuster beginning to implement print on demand at the beginning of the book life cycle. There is a lot of money that publishers leave on the table that we can help bring back to their pockets.


WTT: Talk to us a little about the "book life cycle." Are there some types of books, or portions of the book life cycle, that Lightning Source does NOT participate in?

JKB: In a book’s life cycle, you have a very typical sales curve where it starts off low, screams up very high and then comes back down over the life of a book. Publishers must get into the habit of setting up books in multiple formats at the introduction of a book. Setting up books for offset, simultaneous with print-on-demand and e-Books is so strategic. In the beginning of the life cycle, Lightning can print galleys and advanced reader copies. Normal offset printing should occur when the publisher sees demand climb, while the print-on-demand file is available for use when a book comes back to the 1,000 book a year velocity and it makes sense for a one-book-at-a-time manufacturing process to take over.

With file-ready status, print-on-demand can also assist if there are manufacturing hiccups that interrupt litho printers during a period of time. In those cases, Lightning can step in to handle book printing and fulfillment for three or four weeks till the problem is resolved.

If you look at books like Cold Mountain, we could have helped that publisher with many sales, because they could not get books out for six weeks – on-demand really could have filled the gap. There are lots of examples where Lightning could have jumped in, and assisted publishers in meeting consumer demand even on big sellers. This is why it is so important for publishers to have a multiple-output strategy in place from the beginning of the cycle.


WTT: So I guess it is possible that the next Nora Roberts best seller I buy could have come from your plant! If you think about the book market as a whole, do you have an idea of how many new titles are published in the U.S. and Canada each year? What percent of these new titles would you estimate are candidates for a books-on-demand strategy?

JKB: Lightning focuses its efforts on a certain product range – generally standard book sizes like 5 _ x 8 _, 6x9’s, and 8 _ x 11’s -- books with four-color covers and one color book-blocks. In our product range, you could say that books at certain stages in their life cycle are good candidates for print-on-demand 100% of the time. There are approximately 96,000 to 97,000 companies that apply for ISBN’s every year. There is growth in self-publishing, where people want to publish their own books. We are seeing growth with very small publishers and author services companies - and we are perfect for these individuals. These groups can publish one copy, ten copies or one hundred copies. On-demand printing is an avenue to see how it goes, and not take the risk of putting out tons of money.


WTT: What about backlists? Can you define the term for our readers and describe Lightning’s role in eliminating this industry dilemma?

JKB: Front list are the new books that are coming out – like Red Rabbit by Tom Clancy. Once a book moves through the usual sales cycle, it moves to the backlist. Lightning doesn’t eliminate the backlist; what we do is allow the backlist to live in perpetuity. So we don’t eliminate it, we enhance it forever. An example I can use is The Catcher in the Rye - it went through a usual sales cycle, and now it’s a backlist book. The Catcher in the Rye sells a fair number of copies every year, but it is classified as a backlist book. Usually anything that is a year old is going to be backlisted. We help those books remain active and orderable. Although not exciting and sexy, they are the publisher’s bread and butter and we help it go on and on.


WTT: Kirby, what is your vision for the future of Lightning Source, specifically, and the book industry in general?

JKB: The industry by its own nature has an incredible amount of waste. It is relatively slow to replenish. The industry has to utilize today’s tools that are being proven again and again in other industries, and bring it to ours. There just has to be computer integration of print and inventory and point-of-sale information. That’s really the big thing - integration of point-of-sale, inventory, regular printing, and most importantly, POD. We see Lightning Source playing a key role in helping the industry achieve that goal.


WTT: Kirby, thank you very much for taking the time to share your thoughts with us. Is there a closing message for publishers?

JKB: In addition to operating a world-class manufacturing plant, Lightning is focused on communicating to the publishing community the reasons that POD makes sense. Most publishers make decisions based on cost per unit. Because print on demand impacts the cost dynamics for books well beyond the mere process of putting ink on paper, focusing on the price per unit causes publishers to miss the big picture of how much print-on-demand can save them throughout the book life cycle.

While a lot of publishers are structured to have each business unit look at line items and their costs, today the savvy ones are focusing on the bottom line. With print-on-demand as part of the publishing strategy, the return on investment is far better at $5.00/unit versus the standard $2.00 mark for all the reasons we have talked about today. There are many publishers that have already adopted and integrated a print-on-demand model into their businesses. I encourage all publishers to explore what the technology can do for them


See Part One