Mark Levenson of Sage Publishing gives a print buyer's perspective on drupa

Published on May 25, 2012

Mark Levenson, Manager of US Manufacturing and Composition for Sage Publishing shares his views of drupa 2012. Mark offers a unique perspective from a print buyer's point of view and shares the most exciting thing he saw: nanography!

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Cary Sherburne: Hi, I'm Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink and I'm here with Mark Levenson, who is the Manager of U. S. Manufacturing and Composition for Sage. Welcome.

Mark Levenson: Thank you.

Cary Sherburne: For our viewers maybe you could kind of give us a little review of what Sage is all about?

Mark Levenson: Yeah, Sage Publication is a global publishing company with offices headquartered in Thousand Oaks, California. Offices in the U.K., New Delhi and Singapore. We focus on educational publishing. Therefore, we have K-12 and then also the college reference and another large focus is the research methods journals.

Cary Sherburne: Okay, and so in your role at Sage then, what is your role at Sage?

Mark Levenson: My role at Sage is to oversee all of the actual print buying, working with our print vendors closely. Also working with our composition vendors and making sure that everything's running smoothly.

Cary Sherburne: And we're here at Drupa 2012 in Dusseldorf, Germany and we don't see actually, normally a lot of print buyers here – so why were you interested in coming here?

Mark Levenson: With the big changes going on in the printing industry, it's important to Sage to work closely with our print vendors or our partners, looking at the newest technologies, whether it's in mechanical or digital, seeing what's the best for our printers and also for ourself.

Cary Sherburne: And what is the most existing thing you've seen?

Mark Levenson: Actually, the most exciting thing I've seen is probably the new nanography. I learned a new word today – I think it's fantastic. Also the HP 10,000. You know the concept here at Drupa 2012 seems to be bigger and faster.

Cary Sherburne: Yeah the B12 – sorry – B2 sheet fed digital is just there's just a bunch of them. But you picked a couple of good highlights there. And you don't – I don't know there are a lot of book printing specific solutions here too on the inkjet side. I don't know if you guys are looking into that at all.

Mark Levenson: Yeah, inkjet is definitely being looked in to. What we found is that the toner is good from zero, excuse me one to 500. The toner goes from five to 2,000.

Cary Sherburne: Inkjet.

Mark Levenson: Excuse me, the inkjet goes from five to 2,000 and then we have our traditional or the mechanical printing for higher run quantities.

Cary Sherburne: And so how does that work with you in terms of your relationships? Do you work with print service providers and try to help them decide how to move to the future or do you look for providers that already have those capabilities?

Mark Levenson: Actually, we work with our current vendors. Each of them are actually here at the show as well.

Cary Sherburne: Oh, that's great.

Mark Levenson: So we've been able to meet up with them. Kind of get an idea of what they're looking at and see what best fits for all of us together.

Cary Sherburne: And how many, approximately how many printers are in your portfolio of printers?

Mark Levenson: Currently, we have about four to five. And we usually focus on – or we have three main ones and then we have an international printer.

Cary Sherburne: Okay, great. So the three main ones are the ones that are here with you looking at the technology?

Mark Levenson: Correct.

Cary Sherburne: That's great. That's very exciting. You think you'll come back in 2016?

Mark Levenson: Absolutely. I can't wait to see what's coming out next.

Cary Sherburne: Oh, that's great. Thanks.

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