The news article yesterday covering the recent Interquest Book Publishing Conference and Expo showed once again just how significant is the adoption of digital printing by the book publishing industry. At a time when music and video publishing has moved to downloaded delivery it is interesting to see that printing of books is increasing despite the availability of electronic book reading systems to which digital books can be downloaded. For the digital printing suppliers of production level monochrome sheet and continuous-feed printing systems, printing of digital books have been an important business.

At the forthcoming OnDemand expo in Boston I believe we will see an increasing emphasis on this market by at least one of the suppliers, and in particular this will stress the importance of color in the future growth of this market. At the present time digital book printing from the book publishers is an almost exclusively monochrome market. Up to now it appears that much of the activity we are seeing in printing books in color from digital systems is mainly coming from self-publishing web sites such as Lulu.com. It was interesting however to hear that IBT Global, one of the largest digital book manufacturers in the U.S. that specializes in the professional book market is seeing the positive impact digital color is having on its business.

What I found interesting in comments from the Interquest event was the following from Niko Pfund, Vice President & Publisher, Oxford University Press, noting that digital print quality is no longer an issue: