This morning I went past my stop on the bus because I was so engrossed in Sir Isaac Newton's "First Book of Opticks".
An extract from the great man's study on light and colour was part of a clever promotional book produced by CPI to highlight the capabilities of its new Quantum book production line.
CPI officially launched this offering yesterday evening in front of an assembled audience that was like a Who's Who of publishing.
The regular reader of this column will know that I am a big fan of anything that involves clever and engaging print stuff, and this was exactly that.
CPI now has six HP T350-type lines installed across its European manufacturing platform, but the UK is the first to have a system that includes colour, so a big 'rah for Antony Rowe, which is were the Quantum resides.
It was absolutely fascinating to see what an uplift a relatively small amount of colour can bring to a title, per the clever use of colour in the special edition of Philippa Gregory's Changeling, the first book to be produced using the Quantum colour option. Hats off to David Hyde at Simon & Schuster for jumping on the opportunity to do something different, too.
It's easy to see how this sort of flexible colour capability has the potential to breathe new life into backlist titles, as well as being a cost-effective way of testing ideas. CPI sales director Alison Kaye said that a certain amount of colour, say 10%, can be included for "almost the same price as mono".
Am sure a bunch of publishers will be interested to find out the detail of that.
The Quantum offering is not colour in the style of a glossy Nigella or Delia cookbook, but I can see it being of potential interest in all sorts of publishing applications where cost and pagination constraints would have made colour a complete no-no before now. The anticipated run length window is 50-4,000 copies.
Alison also made a very good point about how this sort of technology is likely to result in a change in the way publishers think about the production costs of some of their titles: "price per sold book not per produced book".
And hey, it might just result in the migration of some print work back to the UK.
Shall look forward to hearing more about Quantum's progress with great interest. The system will move from double- to treble-shift operation in the next few weeks so it sounds like it's off to a good start.
That clever bloke Newton spoke of "... Sensations of those Motions under the Form of Colours". CPI really could have created a colour sensation of its own with Quantum.
