One of the success areas of the past year in digital printing has been the adoption of high-speed continuous inkjet printing by a number of major book printers. One of the reasons for this success has been that a few technically aware, forward thinking book publishers have realized that this technology can change the established book publishing and production model used by publishers for generations. Up to now we have had digital book printing for very short run print-on-demand books using monochrome, sheet-fed and continuous feed toner based digital presses, predominantly from Oce, Ricoh-Infoprint and Xerox. This technology has been too expensive for run lengths beyond around 500 copies, and is almost exclusively used for reprints or personal publishing.

Recently I met with Ed Febinger, Corporate VP of Manufacturing & Inventory Management of Pearson, one of the world's most progressive publishers. Pearson's business is predominantly in educational books, travel books (Dorling Kindersley) and newspapers.  It is interesting to note that Ed Febinger's business title covers inventory management. This is one of the major problems for publishers in terms of defining how many books to print and how long to store unsold books. Febinger saw the opportunity when he met with HP at Drupa in 2008 having previously seen the T300 press. After Drupa Febinger took a data file with a number of Pearson' books in it and asked all the digital press suppliers to print a book for him. From this he concluded at this time that the HP T300 press best fitted the Pearson model in terms of print quality, flexibility, running cost and offset substitution. From that time Pearson has worked with a number of printers who have introduced the HP press and have produced a large number of books.

HP T300 Color Inkjet Web Press