Cary Sherburne: I’m Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink.com and I’m here with Aditya Chinai, who is Managing Director of King Printing, in the Boston area. Welcome.

Aditya Chinai: Thank you Cary, good morning.

Cary: So you’ve seen some changes in your book printing business. Maybe you could talk to us a little bit about some of the newer technologies that you’ve adopted and some of the transitional things that you’ve done with your business to keep it current.

Aditya: Well over the past three years, we’ve definitely seen the trend to shorter runs seeing as how our business is always focused on short runs, we’ve always found platforms that will help drive the efficiencies of that for our customers. We’ve been an early adopter of inkjet Predrupa in early 2008…

Cary: Before or the Inkjet drupa.

Aditya: Before the Inkjet drupa. We adopted a four-color inkjet device. We’ve now installed our second four-color inkjet device and both are really key to driving shorter runs for our customers.

Cary: And they’re both from… which one… which inkjets did you choose?

Aditya: So we have two platforms. We have the screen True Press Jet 520, and we have the HP T300.

Cary: And so do you find… are you able to like get them to look the same pretty much or why do you have… why do you have two different ones?

Aditya: Well they’re both workhorses for us. They both run around the clock. They offer different capabilities. We’ve also decided to install a Kodak Prosper Press.

Cary: Okay.

Aditya: And a lot of people ask us why we’ve chose three different platforms rather than focusing on one standardized platform. And really, each device offers capabilities that others may not have. So, some may print on better media stock, some may print on wider media, some may print on narrow media, and then we can focus on different market segments.

Cary: So depending on the requirement for this particular book, you choose which press, whether it goes offset or whether it goes to one… which one of the three.

Aditya: That’s right.

Cary: And doesn’t that create some issue in terms of handling all the rolls because they’re all different sizes, handling and storing and stocking and…

Aditya: We actually have standardized on our roll sizes by press and so what that allows us to do is work just in time for our customers. We’ve become more of an inventory manager for our customers as they look to eliminate their warehouse, as they look to cut their costs; we’ve transitioned into that life of title management. So we’re able to produce short run, let’s say it’s on the True Press, quantity of 10 or 50 books, and that may transition into a hundred copies or 500 or 1,000 copies which we can do on an HP T300 and if it exceeds that, if it goes to a 5,000 or 10,000 quantity run, that’ll go to our Web Offset.

Cary: Okay. And you are an early adopter in the book printing business with inkjet. I’m curious how that was received by the publishers, I mean, because it’s a different look and feel, it’s a different technology…

Aditya: You know, the past three years have really been important for inkjet. It’s reached a point, and I think we’ve all heard the term offset substitutable and it really has come very close to that. The end user in a lot of instances don’t know the differences of where the output was created.

Cary: And what about color because, you know, most… I mean especially in the trade books. A lot of trade books are black and white insides, but you’re saying now you’ve got the ability to do color insides.

Aditya: That’s right, we were primarily working in the one-color market space, but we’ve seen a lot of our customer’s transition into the four-color market space. And so that was one of the reasons why we did install this additional capacity.

Cary: So education and children’s books would be the primary color?

Aditya: That’s right.

Cary: Cookbooks.

Aditya: Cookbooks, children’s books, some trade quarterly kind of publications, they utilize color. And especially as the costs have come down with digital printing, we’ve been able to share that. It’s by no means free, and it’s by no means dirt cheap, but it’ll allow you to share cost savings and allow your customers to gain revenue.

Cary: and where do you see this going in the future, I mean, do you see yourselves expanding your offset or expanding inkjet or both?

Aditya: I don’t think that offset will every die, but for us, we’ll probably focus more on digital. Again, our customers are driving toward shorter run lengths. I think you’ll see the middle market being squeezed out, people doing 5,000 or 10,000 copies, will probably have to face some hard realities soon. People will be operating in the 50,000, 40,000 plus offset market or they’re going to operate down in the lower 100 to 500 echelon.

Cary: You know, it’s been fascinating for me to watch the transition in the book market because there’s so much waste in the traditional supply chain. So now you’re really able to help them print to order instead of print to speculation of what the order quantity might be.

Aditya: That’s right, that’s one of the enablers of the digital technology, especially with the rise of inkjet, is your frequency of orders increase whereas the quantity of each run decreases. So we may see a title print ten times in a month of 50 copies instead of one large run.

Cary: Right. No, the last question has to do with the finishing, are you pretty much doing inline, near line, offline, how are you doing the binding? Obviously, case biding is probably offline.

Aditya: That’s right. We’re a big proponent of near line finishing. It allows us the most amount of flexibility. I believe it really differs on each person’s product mix and each company’s product mix. If you can focus on one type of product, inline is a good way to go.

Cary: So you’re… that means it doesn’t matter what press it comes off of, you can pretty much go you know, you can move that finishing line.

Aditya: That’s right. So for us, if we produce a four-color title, we can take those foot blocks and produce a case bound, perfect bound, spiral bound and not be bound to just one type of finishing.

Cary: That’s great. Well it sounds like a very exciting business segment to be in right now. What about electronic… I said it was my last questions, but I lied. What about electronic formats. Do you help people with that, like for my Kindle?

Aditya: I think the interview has ended. No, you know, we’ve decided to enable our customers to grow with ebooks and we’ve found that producing ebooks has allowed people to drive print. And so we are creating epub type formats for people who will put it on their Kindle, PDF is actually still a very, very popular for your smart phone devices, your Blackberry and your iPhones. I think that that’s going to grow and you’re going to have to see a hybrid if you’re going to succeed.

Cary: That’s great. Thank you so much.

Aditya: Thank you Cary.