One of the fastest growing markets in digital printing is the photobook market. This is a market where the application is for creating a photobook with digital pictures, that are uploaded to the company hosting the application, and where the photobook is then printed digitally and bound into a deliverable product. It surprises me that this is still relatively unknown to the vast majority of potential buyers of this product. I find that if I leave a nicely produced photobook on a coffee table at home that visitors will pick it up and first comment favourably on it, and then state, “this must have cost a lot of money.” They are amazed when I tell them how easy it is to produce and how cheap the book is. Often it is a lot cheaper than printing out images taken digitally and then putting them into a photo album

What is really interesting today is that digital cameras are as popular as cell phones. Then one also has to say that today it is almost impossible to buy a cell phone without a digital camera built into it. Today modern cell phones boast cameras with around 5 megapixel plus picture formats, so the quality of images from these cell phones is of a high standard. At the same time the quality of images from ‘point and shoot’ digital cameras is extremely high, often with 8 megapixel plus image formats and good quality lenses with 10 times plus zoom factors. We are also seeing an increasing demand for single lens reflex (SLR) digital cameras with incredible resolutions and really high-quality lenses. Because of all this, there is an explosion in the availability of quality and high-quality digital images. The question is what do we do with them? Now if we are highly social we can share our photos on photo sharing web sites like Flickr, Snapfish, Photobox, Picasa, Smugmug, Photobucket, or on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. If however we treasure our ‘Kodak Moments’ and really want to keep our photos and look back on them in future, the photo album has always been the display method of choice.

This is why the digital photobook is such a great development. It is not new and it has been around for some time, but it is still largely unknown but a huge proportion of the population. This is why it is seen as such a major growth market for digital printing. My comment about the application being largely unknown is not just taken from my experiences of leaving out a photobook on my coffee table. Whenever I am speaking at conferences around the world and I come to the subject of photobooks, I ask the audience two questions. The first is how many have at least one digital camera? The answer wherever I go is 100% of the audience. The second question is how many of the audience have created and had printed a photobook? In these circumstances I am speaking to a digital print aware community, but I have never had more than 20% of the audience show they have created a photobook. There is a massive market for the digital photobook suppliers still to exploit.