“Everything’s up for debate,” says Rod Willett, managing director of Kings Lynn book printer Biddles. “Everything from business models, to customers and where they come from, to administration procedures and what services you offer.” In a few short years’ time, Willett predicts, some book printers will be barely recognisable from their old selves.
Splitting the book printing sector into its main constituent products – broadly, colour ‘coffee-table’ case-bound books, short-run colour books, mono books, and academic books and journals – reveals some common themes.

Digital freedom
The switch from film to CTP, while long established, still reverberates in the book print sector: CTP allows publishers to hold files rather than film, and to swap their reprint requirements around at will, thereby unsettling previously long-standing relationships with their printers. And the increasing uptake of digital technology across all sectors
has led to new business models for printers, allowing publishers to order less units on a more frequent basis. Responding to this, book printers at each end of the capacity scale now have some form of digital production facility – since Antony Rowe installed the sector’s first Xerox DocuTech in 1991, digital presses have been de rigeur in a book printer’s armoury.

On-demand market
It’s both a cause and a symptom of the rapid pace of change that book printing is no longer just the province of book printers. Booksellers are beginning to take their printing in-house – in November last year, Amazon famously installed multiple HP Indigo presses to handle on-demand book production, while libraries and booksellers around the US and Canada are installing short-run print and bind lines to produce ‘walk up’ books for customers. Publishers themselves are taking advantage of easier-to-use technology and installing digital presses to produce their own books – Forward Press’s purchase of a new Océ VarioPrint this summer has allowed the publisher to reduce its outsourcing bills and take control of its own production chain: “It will give us sufficient capacity to print books for some other smaller publishers as well as deliver our own products,” says Forward managing director Ian Walton.

Run lengths, of course, are shorter than they ever were, and ultra-short run and print-on-demand are on the rise in all sectors except case-bound colour books. And on top of all those damning factors, there is also the well-publicised bleed of colour book work overseas – to China, Eastern Europe, and Spain and Italy, where print is subsidised by government to the average tune of 30% – an unarguable plus for a publisher in the UK. In the past 10 years, that migration of work has spread from case-bound colour books to other types of book too; any job, in fact, where time-sensitivity isn’t an issue. Carrick Wilkie, sales development director at Cambrian Printers, also chairs the books sector committee of the BPIF, which is planning to tackle the UK government about the availability of subsidies for UK book printers. “If we could achieve even a single-figure subsidy, it would help us to keep some of the work that’s currently flooding out of this country,” he says.

However, subsidies may be just a pipe dream, as Wilkie admits, and in the meantime, book printers are having to act to ensure their own survival. One means of doing so is through structural change. Book printers are consolidating and restructuring – the summer saw a rash of acquisitions and closures including the dramatic double-whammy of CPI Group’s purchase of single- and two-colour book printer Clowes, together with the closure of its long-run colour book operation Bath Press. On a smaller scale, Middlesex-based Creative Print & Design was bought by Danish book print group Nørhaven in January. Large book printing organisations are also shuffling money around internally in order to underpin security: Butler & Tanner’s £3m refinancing deal, completed in February, was swiftly followed by the colour book printer’s purchase by Media & Print Investments. And in the past couple of years, publishers are buying their way into the supply chain: book printer Oaklands Book Services was bought by one of its major clients, NPI Group, in May this year.

Upgraded equipment
Large book printers have followed the lead of the UK’s general commercial printers in investing to modernise equipment and make it more efficient, thereby preserving margins. Clowes’ multiple post-press investment in May 2006 was intended to “add extra capacity and efficiency,” according to managing director Ian Foyster. CPI subsidiary Antony Rowe has invested £1m to double its turnover in the next three years with a Xerox Nuvera digital press and a Muller Martini SigmaBinder bookline.

But while the volume book printers invest to streamline, the necessity for innovation is apparent in all areas of book printing. New opportunities are opening up among the turmoil, and the survivors are sniffing them out. Cambrian Printers’ investment over the past five years has all been geared to adding new services for its publishing customers. “We’ve found that we need to be a total service provider,” says Wilkie. “Ten years back, we’d just print a book, bind it and deliver it. Now we print, bind, laminate, mail, deliver and give a digital option as well as a litho one.”

Adding value
Biddles is also going the route of extending its services around the basic print offering, as Rod Willett explains: “To our smaller publishing customers we offer a marketing materials service that we call Spectrum – it occurred to us that we have all the information and the images for a book on our system, so why not use them for in-store marketing materials too?” The company also offers electronic ordering, storage, distribution and warehousing, “which adds an enormous amount of value to the relationship, especially with smaller customers,” Willett says. Biddles also does a lot of work with self-publishers, offering editorial and design services, plus a day’s training course in the production process and some tutoring in self-distribution, known as All Booked Up.

Willett, who always seems to have a forward-thinking strategy up his sleeve, has identified another area where digital presses can score: for first-time prints. “Publishers are familiar with the digital press as a reprint method, but we want to encourage them to use it first time round,” he says. Willett’s reasoning is sound: “The traditional order pattern is to produce a given quantity of books, of which a third are usually sold on publication and the remainder sell on a declining basis of 50% year-on-year. So the publisher doesn’t make all his money back from a book until four
years hence. That’s a long time to tie up your capital, but of course book printers have been happily printing these large orders because it’s all money for them. But there comes a time when you have to hold up your hands and say ‘the game’s up’ – digital can produce a third of the original order volume to an equivalent quality, and you’re freeing up capital for the publisher.” Suicidal? “Not at all,” Willett says. “Just another way in which digital technology frees up your business thinking. This way, the customer comes back at least twice more in the next few years. You’re adding longevity to the relationship.”

Nurturing specialisms
Another way to secure a niche in book printing is to develop specialisms that are prohibited from heading overseas. Cambrian Printers’ Wilkie describes his company’s niche in time-sensitive books – “where the file comes in on Monday and they want 50,000 copies by Friday” – and work for publishers whose environmental stance prevents them sending work overseas due to the shipping miles it clocks up on its way back.

Wilkie feels that short-run colour is a big growth area for book printers: “Two years, ago our mono prices were fine, but now we struggle against some of the guys out there with large-format presses. Ultimately, I think the vast majority of mono work we do as a company will go to printers who want to run with a low-margin model, using online ordering and large-format litho fulfilment.” Wilkie says Cambrian is more interested in colour books: “Not coffee-table books, but the bespoke shorter-run colour, anything from 50 copies digitally to 10,000 copies litho. That’s the kind of work where you can develop a customer relationship and add value to it by means of service, logistics and distribution.”

Service extensions
For book printers who choose not to go down the complementary services route, there are still plenty of service extensions within the printroom. Glasgow-based academic book printer Bell & Bain has found that its Muller Martini SigmaLine short-run book production system can be used to produce shorter runs of books that will eventually be printed in volume, for purposes such as proofing and reviewing. “We began offering that facility to a number of new customers who hadn’t given us their litho orders before,” says managing director Ian Walker, “and we offered them an incentive to come back to us with the litho order.”

On-demand production has had the effect of revolutionising the concept of the ‘backlist’: initiatives such as the Open Content Alliance’s bank of 250,000 out-of-copyright titles and Amazon subsidiary BookSurge’s move to make thousands of rare books available via digital print, have forced publishers to think again about how they place orders for print. On the strength of this, more and more book printers are waking up to the print-on-demand business model. Cromwell Press Group is the latest entrant to the POD market, launching its Cpod division back in May this year. Cpod focuses on the academic and educational market: “The trend is definitely towards digital print,” says Cpod managing director Robert Hunt. “Publishers are realising that they are losing out on revenue from books that have gone out of print.”

In the same vein, other printers are exploiting the full capacities of their digital presses to open new markets: the variable data capacity of many RIPs offers rich pickings in personalisation. New types of book product are being invented, and not just by book printers – class yearbooks, in print runs of 30-40, are now a staple of business for commercial printer Buckingham Colour Quest, while individualised prospectuses, matched to students’ preferences entered via a website, are a lucrative line for direct mail printer SR Communications.

While the book sector is in the throes of dramatic and far-reaching change, the opportunities it offers are enormous, believes Rod Willett: “It’s been a culture shock for some book printers, who have been very cosy for a long time, but the wind of change is blowing and it will ultimately streamline the book print industry in this country.”

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CASE STUDY: TJ INTERNATIONAL
Padstow-based TJ’s chief executive Angus Clark is an old hand at moving with the times, but even so, the last three years have been “incredible – so much change”, he says. “We’re doing just about everything now, whereas 10 years ago, we were just printing and binding.” 

TJ invested in its first digital presses back in 1999 and upgraded them three years ago to offer the TJI Digital Short-Run service; it now runs an Océ VarioStream 9210 web-fed digital press for two-colour work and a cut-sheet VarioPrint 6250 for runs from 150 copies down to just nine. Being one of the first UK book printers to offer a short-run facility, the company has developed that market, and now offers publishers a range of short-run print products, including review copies, market test copies and proof copies. TJ also offers its publishing customers a design facility, together with assistance in typesetting and picture management.

One major change at TJ is the addition of a stock management, distribution, warehousing and publisher’s warehouse replenishment service. “Stockholding is a big part of where publishers’ costs lie, so it’s an obvious area for us to go into,” Clark says. The replenishment service in particular rides on the back of TJ’s digital facility, allowing publishers to re-order backlist books in ultra-short runs. In conjunction with these services, TJ has designed a secure web ordering and tracking facility for its customers, linked to its Agfa Delano workflow which sees projects through pre-press, including online proofing, and links to the firm’s MIS to generate admin documents automatically.

For higher-volume production, TJ runs a KBA Rapida 142 and a B1 Heidelberg Speedmaster. Clark is in the midst of rejigging the customer service department and retraining his CSRs so they can all sell both digital and conventional print: “Increasingly, there’s less of a difference in quality and speed, and we need to be offering both as a seamless package,” he says.