In days gone by, a print company spending a few million quid on new equipment would hardly have warranted a front-page slot, no matter how important it might be to the company in question.

However, in the present climate, any sizeable investment must be considered newsworthy. And furthermore, when the sector we are talking about is book printing – a sector that even just a few years ago was already all but written off in the UK, even though e-books were still just a twinkle in an Amazon executive’s eye, as a result of overcapacity and cheap foreign imports – it has to be big news.

It seems that digital technology, even though it only accounts for a tiny fraction of the books in circulation, has breathed renewed vitality into the struggling book sector.

Of course, digitally produced books have been around for years, so it would be pretty difficult to describe the last few weeks’ activity as a digital revolution, but this latest brace of big inkjet spends has to be good news for print: proving that rather than just rolling over and dying, by embracing new technologies and new strategies, you can identify new opportunities.

And that has to be the name of the game: opportunity. Cutting costs, improving efficiency and boosting productivity are all laudable goals for any investment, but it only starts to get really interesting when an investment becomes a game-changer and creates a new market or bolsters an old one.

Darryl Danielli, editor, PrintWeek