The digital printing of books has become a major area of interest, and it is a business focus where there has been substantial investment this year. This investment has been in many of the new continuous feed high-speed color inkjet presses. Digital book printing however has been around for a long time, since before we saw this latest stage in its development. This latest move into color book printing allows for longer print runs using digital printing, which then become more economical. The short run printing of books using digital printing has been a major development for some time, with leading printers like Lightning Source and CPI having significant operations using both sheet-fed and continuous feed monochrome xerographic presses. Book sellers like Amazon have also entered the business to convert stored digital libraries into printed books on demand, whenever an order is received. We have also seen a major growth in self publishing of books using web sites like lulu.com and printers like Colorcentric.

In following up on the new inkjet printing technology I recently visited one of the printers that had invested in this technology. King Printing in Lowell, MA was perhaps the first book printer to invest in this new inkjet technology when it became the first commercial printing company in North America to install the Screen Truepress Jet520. Not only was it the first book printer in the USA to invest in inkjet technology, I believe it may have been the first book printer to invest in digital technology two decades before. Then earlier this year it installed an HP T300 press and also made a commitment for a Kodak Prosper 1000 monochrome inkjet press. My reason for visiting King Printing, apart from the fact I was on my way to a meeting near Lowell, was that I was intrigued to see what was special about them. I had been in contact with the company and met the Chinai family, the owners of King Printing, at IPEX earlier this year.

Now I am used to visiting many of these progressive printers, and I often find them in modern large facilities, and they often can be subsidiaries of large organisations. King Printing did not fit this mold and I found them in a modest, but well kept, plant on a business estate. The company had no plush reception or grandiose meeting rooms and was just like many small and medium sized printers one finds all around the world. What I did find however was a company that may well have started the market for short run digital book printing.