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Everything used to be so clear, the roles defined, parameters set, work allocated according to type - everyone knew their place. But then people started messing with the system.

Phones weren’t just for talking into any more, they become multimedia communication tools; Tesco added insurance and banking services to its food aisles; British Gas, in defiance of its name, started selling electricity. And now book printers have been sucked into this one-stop shop game as well.

"Twenty years ago, we used to be very clear on the roles within the book industry – what a printer did, what a publisher did, what a book warehouse did," explains St Ives Clays managing director Kate McFarlan. "However, things have changed and people have to look again at what can be done, where to reduce cost and reduce time. It is an evolutionary process, with all businesses involved in the sector looking at who does what."

For printers, the ‘what’ is no longer just putting ink on paper. Publishers are presiding over slim budgets and, as a consequence, they are demanding efficiencies in the supply chain. Magpie-like, the big commercial book printers have taken the initiative and swooped on various elements of the book production line and brought them in-house to provide both the time and cost savings demanded. Delivery, conversion, software integration – not much has been left untouched. Meanwhile, at the more bespoke end of the market, it is the skill and knowledge of the print process that forms the crux of the added-value sales pitch, with the ability to offer expertise in the print process as much a selling point as cutting 10% off delivery costs.

Direct deliveries
Logistics is perhaps the most established area of added-value services in the sector. Where once a title was printed by the hundreds of thousands and stored until needed, publishers are adopting a ‘less, but more often’, on-demand approach to printing that has opened the door for printers to cut out the warehousing middle man. Shorter-run lengths are now packaged up and delivered by the printers directly to retailers as and when they are needed.

To facilitate this service, most of the big commercial printers now offer a virtual warehouse system. CPI UK, for example, has launched Highway, a software programme that enables publishers to log on and change quantities of stock, specify delivery details and track production progress, among a range of other options.

"Before, we would deliver books to distribution warehouses and then publisher’s distributed to their customers," explains Dino Bishop, CPI UK marketing communications manager. "Over the past year or two, there has been a strong trend towards direct deliveries and now much of what we do is delivering publishers’ products directly to the customers like Waterstones or Asda."

But delivery is not always the best option. Book publishing is a global affair and, until recently, the global printing solution was for UK publishers to print everything in the UK and then ship it out to other markets. Shipping large quantities of books nowadays will do nothing for your environmental reputation, nor your bank balance, as the costs of shipping are rocketing. The print community has therefore adapted to provide an alternative.

International partnerships
UK printers are increasingly forming partnerships with print companies in other regions so that, if a publisher wishes to print 10,000 copies of a title but 3,000 of those are for, say, the Australian market, the print file can be sent to an Australian partner to be printed in that region.

"The ability to shoot a file anywhere in the world and manufacture a short run to, if not exactly, very nearly exactly the same standard of product is now crucial," says Tony Chard, managing director at MPG Books Group.   

B,T&D managing director Kevin Sarney adds that having the option of cheaper overseas production also allows the printer to offer a more complete service. B,T&D linked with a Chinese printer last year and Sarney says it means that whatever the publisher requests at whatever price point, B,T&D should be able to cater for that need.

"It is coming to the point where the publisher has to have a choice within a single company," he says. "If they want books very quickly, samples, backlist production – whatever they want they should be able to get it from a single company."

Integral to all these added services is the role of IT. Whether it’s managing stock, tracking production, or global print solutions, a robust and efficient IT system is essential. To save publishers’ money, therefore, commercial book printers have had to spend some of their own.

"When printers used to talk about making investments, they would talk about installing finishing lines and presses," says Clays’ McFarlan. "Now it’s about IT. We have an IT team of our own now and we have built Clays Online as the basis of our IT offering to customers. We have spent several million pounds on this investment already, but it is an ongoing process."

It’s "ongoing" because an IT solution does not just mean building a website. Printers are integrating their own MIS with that of the customers, so that when a client puts data into its own order forms, the work tickets at the printer are automatically updated. This prevents double handling of information and again cuts time from the process.

There is a danger, perhaps, that this approach makes the transactions impersonal and erodes the carefully formed relationships between printers and clients that are essential in creating the best products. Bishop, however, argues that the whole added-value concept in fact forms stronger relationships with clients. And it is not just existing relationships that are being strengthened says Clays’ McFarlan – conversations about print are expanding beyond the production rooms of publishing houses.

"Printers used to have relationships only with the production directors and production staff," she says. "We still have relationships with these people, but we also have to have relationships far more deeply in the supply chain, so we now have conversations with retailers and distributors. You need a new set of conversations to know how to progress."

Allied to these new conversations are new ways of thinking. The most startling example is the approach of some printers to ebooks. Far from trying to combat the threat, many printers now offer ebook conversion as part of their services. Inviting the enemy to sleep in the spare bedroom may seem a dangerous move, but the mood among many book printers is pragmatic: ebooks are a part of the mix now and it is better to embrace them and make money from them than to sit back and watch them eat into their profits.

CPI’s Bishop says: "We offer ebook conversion because we are making sure we are not just a book printer but a solution provider to the publishing industry in terms of how the book is conveyed to the customer and all the elements that go into that, not just printing a hard-copy book. It is the age-old thing of giving the customer what they want."

This last point is worth bearing in mind. For the big, commercial book printers, investing millions in integrated IT systems and delivery options is proportionate; the big publishers expect it, But, in the bespoke book market, these services are often irrelevant as far as the client is concerned and, for some, they are out of reach financially anyway.

The added-value sell for the bespoke market is, therefore, more about the skill of the printing and the knowledge of the process. Communicating this knowledge to the publisher or client becomes the added service, perhaps taking on a design consultancy role or simply being at the end of the phone or available for a meeting to discuss print options.

"Where we add value is by bringing our knowledge of really interesting papers, printing techniques and bindings to the table," says Beacon Press director Richard Owers. "We have worked in this area for many years and so we have a really bespoke offering embedded in the business."

As for the future, the possibilities for increased services are limited only by imagination. One potential area for development for all types of book printer is multi-media. B,T&D’s Sarney foresees increased cross-media work, with more interaction between books and online – something QR codes are facilitating elsewhere in the industry. Also, inserts such as CDs and DVDs are already proving popular and having a hand in the production side of the content for
these in-house may one day fall under the printer’s remit.

"In the future, we will be providing services that take us deeper into the supply chain," says Clays’ McFarlan. "I think we will become much more integrated with our customers."

Book printers cannot afford to ignore the new reality. At the commercial-retail end of the market, reducing the supply chain is crucial to saving time and money, and printers have to be proactive in seeking to bring services in-house. At the more bespoke end of the market, value can still be added by using and communicating print knowledge more effectively.
As MPG’s Chard says, the market is now about "how valuable you are in the supply chain and how much more valuable you could be". Fortunately for all book printers, their position in the production process means they have the potential to be very valuable indeed.