The majority of the new continuous feed color presses in the market today are designed predominantly for direct mail and transactional printing. It is true that a few have moved more into the commercial printing space for book and newspaper production, but they are the exception. At drupa HP announced its Inkjet Web Press that differed from other continuous feed color presses in that it had a web width of 30 inches compared with the other presses 20-inch web width. At the time I called the HP press a transitional press as I saw it as the first digital press that would really attack the profitable area of medium run length offset printing in areas such as book printing. I found it particularly interesting that one of the beta customers announced by HP was CPI, one of the world’s largest book printers. They told me that they saw this press would change the buying dynamics of book publishers.

Earlier this month Océ held an event in Poing, Germany, called Home of Color. At this event they announced a number of new continuous feed color presses to round out their Jetstream color inkjet press range. One of these new presses was the Jetstream 2800, and this followed the HP Inkjet Web Press in offering a 30-inch width web. Océ stated that this press was targeted at the book and newspaper printing markets where the wider web allowed better support for the print formats of these markets. For example most newspapers can print a double page spread width across the web rather than down the web thus making full use of the presses capacity and allowing higher running speeds. In early May HP will be hosting an event for potential press customers at the site of the first beta user of the HP Inkjet Web Press, O’Neil Data Systems in Los Angeles and one of the first jobs produced is the O’Neil weekly stock book. This is a book of historical financial data on a range of stocks now printed in color whereas it was previously printed predominantly monochrome, and produced in a timescale that would be impossible for offset printing.

This brings me to the point of this article and it is the change in financial viability for digital printing of books in medium run lengths and in color. Up to now digital printing of books has been very successful for run lengths up to around 600 copies and in monochrome only. The use of monochrome continuous and sheet fed digital presses has changed the dynamics of book publishing by allowing the production of books in very short run lengths. This has meant that books never need to go out of print.

The economics of book publishing are largely dictated by inventory of books that have been printed. At the Océ event we were show figures taken from German publishers that showed 66% of books were in inventory for up to two years, 11% for between two and five years. At the other end of the scale 18% of books were in inventory for more than ten years. The figures also showed that the number of new books being published is increasing each year and that in 2007 more than 96,000 new titles were published in Germany. In the UK in 2007 more than 100,000 new titles were added. This is all adding to inventory and typing up huge amounts of publishers’ capital. Figures also show that the run lengths for books are reducing, as with most other forms of printing, and that are large proportion are now between 2,000 – 5,000 copies.

What is interesting to look at is how modern digital technology relates to offset printing technology is comparing the running costs and where the technologies cross over in terms of these running costs. I recently commented in an article on sheet fed digital color printing on a study carried out by Infotrends that showed how new presses such as the HP Indigo 7000 are competing against offset in run lengths in the 2,000 – 5,000 level. Océ at their Home of Color Event showed their calculations on comparative costs against offset printing for book production using continuous feed inkjet printing. The example they quoted was for a soft cover oversize A4 112 page four-color book. The calculated figures for printing this offset on a 40 inch eight unit (four over four colors) press compared with printing on a 20-inch width Océ Jetstream 2200 press. This showed the break-even point at which time offset became cheaper at 3,458 copies. A major differentiating factor however was that using offset technology the book would take thirty hours to print whereas using the Océ Jetstream 2200 it would take four hours.

These figures were calculated on a 20-inch wide press, so one would expect that if they were done on the 30-inch Jetstream 2800 the break-even point may well be more than 4,000 copies. If one extends this to assess what it may be on the HP press that has similar performance to the Jetstream 2800 but costs significantly less, and which will have an integrated Timpson book finishing system for the book printing market, the break-even could even be in excess of 5,000 copies.

When one looks at such pricing and performance figures with fully automated continuous feed digital presses one can see how this could change the book printing industry. The cost of printing books digitally does not really change with run length and it is very economic to print short run books. With this being the case I can see publishers may drop the idea for most books of printing a large number of copies in order to get a good print cost, and which would then be held in inventory. Instead the average run length may drop as publishers switch to print the initial order by inkjet using one of the new wider format inkjet color presses.

At present we are only seeing output from these new inkjet presses on uncoated papers, however this will soon change. I have already seen test output from inkjet color presses on coated stocks and I am sure that certain suppliers will soon offer these. When this happens I have to wonder if we will start to see some B2B magazines switch to digital printing, particularly if some personalization can be included. Up to now magazines have not switched to digital printing. Perhaps that will be the next thing to look for. As I have said before the 30-inch width inkjet color presses are transitional presses and they will be the devices that start the transition of profitable offset printing to digital printing.