Boulder, CO – June 3, 2008: InfoPrint Solutions Company, a joint venture between IBM and Ricoh, today announced that National Hirschfeld LLC is installing a flagship InfoPrint 5000 to drive the next wave of dynamic publishing and Print-On-Demand (POD) solutions. Denver, Colorado-based National Hirschfeld has selected the full-color, continuous forms, inkjet drop-on-demand printing system to deliver customized textbooks for education, as well as bringing the benefits of high quality color and personalized POD to customers in other growth sectors, like direct marketing.
 
The InfoPrint 5000’s high speed, quality of output and ease-of-use allows National Hirschfeld to solve many of the pain points for educational publishers. To date, cost, quality and volume issues have limited the widespread uptake of printing customized full color textbooks, on demand. Previously, conventional printing was limited to versioning within long print runs. This, coupled with the high cost of warehousing inventory, made dynamic publishing uneconomical. This new technology also solves the problem of obsolescence by keeping the textbooks current, meaning publishers can minimize the used book market while increasing revenues.
 
National Hirschfeld’s customers can now order precise runs of customized color books, printed as required, and produced at high speeds and quality, yet without the high costs traditionally associated with such services. This means highly specific information for niche audiences, such as students, can be produced quickly and easily in very small quantities.
 
“Personalization is driving change throughout the printing world, and is now reaching the Print-On-Demand sector,” said Rob Malkin, COO at National Hirschfeld. “Add high quality, low cost color to this recipe and eventually we will see a world where professors customize books on a page-by-page level, with the potential of printing billions of different pages. Teaming with InfoPrint Solutions, we are leading this seismic shift in the industry and moving to a truly customized solutions environment.”
 
National Hirschfeld will use the InfoPrint 5000 to deliver competitive advantages to its customers in other sectors, including direct marketing and catalog printing. The company has nine competencies, from offset through direct to POD, web printing and collateral. It uses three conventional web and five large sheet fed presses to work with customers across several vertical sectors: books, financial services, insurance and direct marketing.
 
“Personalized publishing is the next big thing in the production print space,” says Chris Reid, director of global solutions at InfoPrint Solutions Company. “We will see individualized versions of much of the hard copy printed content on the market today, from newspapers, car manuals and travel guides to the high end textbooks that National Hirschfeld will start to produce on the InfoPrint 5000. The inclusion of one-on-one messaging, gives audiences with the exact information they need, which will drive demand in this sector.”
 
Based in Denver, National Hirschfeld is over 100 years old, and was formed from a consolidation of three regional printers: C&M Press, National Printing and Packaging and AB Hirschfeld Press. The printer has been producing monochrome textbooks for some time, and the installation of the InfoPrint 5000 marks a major shift to a true inkjet, drop-on-demand environment meeting educational publishers’ demands for color, speed and quality.
 
InfoPrint and National Hirschfeld will work together on co-branded collateral, business development and solutions support for customers.
 
Using AFP to ensure accurate and consistent color every time
National Hirschfeld will benefit from InfoPrint’s expertise in the open, industry-standard AFP Color Management Architecture (ACMA). InfoPrint was one of the chief architects of AFP, which is now endorsed by the print industry to provide accurate, consistent and device-independent color rendering.
 
The InfoPrint 5000 incorporates the many benefits of AFP such as page-level error recovery, data integrity, auditability and control.  It also enables highly-flexible page composition using AFP and Intelligent Print Data Stream (IPDS). These benefits allow customers to manage short print runs of complex books easily and quickly.