Senior vice president Ed Febinger told the audience how the 37,000-staff company, which publishes education and consumer books as well as newspapers such as the FT, expects consumer behaviour and new technology to massively influence its printing requirements.
"If there's one reason why inkjet is important, it's the iPad," he said. "The ebook dialogue is the most important reason why short-run printing is so important – it makes it really difficult to know how much to print. With the cost of minimum print runs and the Kindle to worry about, that becomes impossible.
"We know it's going to be disruptive to us, so we need to make it disruptive to our printers. If the customer wants to get the book on an iPad, what am I going to do?
"For us it's don't print it until you need it."
He said that the company had taken the Pareto's Principle 80/20 approach to its operations, and with around 4,500 titles in its portfolio contributing 80% of revenues, the remaining 22,000 were subject to high fixed costs relative to their short runs in offset, making inkjet the alternative for many of them.
Coupled with the benefits of a variable cost structure, shorter lead times, automated replenishment and inventory management schemes, the only other test inkjet had to pass was quality he said – inkjet products had to be indistinguishable from their offset counterparts.
Pearson's influence is such that at Drupa 2008 it challenged inkjet manufacturers to produce an offset quality work and with only HP able to meet its requirements at the time, it was decisive in its influence over the investment plans of its printers, such as Rotolito.
Febinger added that while inkjet would potentially enable the publisher to print closer to the point of need, returning some book printing to its domestic origin, it would still call the shots on third-party printers it used, based on whether they used the technologies and equipment it specified.
Even so, when asked whether he would prefer to sell a book as a printed or electronic product, he said the benefits of the up front payment and the lack of supply chain issues with ebooks win out.
