The transition from offset to digital in book printing is very much underway

摘要

The majority of the new continuous-feed colour presses in the market today are designed predominantly for direct mail and transactional printing. However, at Drupa, HP announced something a little different in the form of its Inkjet Web Press. It had a web width of 30in, rather than the standard 20in. At the time, I said this would be a transitional machine, the first digital press that would really attack the profitable area of medium-run length offset printing in areas such as book printing. And it hasn't been too long before someone joined them. Earlier this month at its Home of Color event in Poing, Germany, Oce unveiled the Jetstream 2800, which boasted a 30in width web. It is targeted at the book and newspaper printing markets where the wider web allows for better support for the print formats of these markets. These two releases suggest digital printing has become financially viable for medium run lengths and for colour. Up to now, digitally printing books has been very successful for run lengths up to around 600 copies and in monochrome only. The economics of book publishing are largely dictated by the inventory of books that have been printed. At the Oce event, figures taken from German publishers showed that 66% of books were in inventory for up to two years, 11% for between two and five years. At the other end of the scale, 18% of books were in inventory for more than 10 years. The figures also showed that the number of new books being published is increasing each year and that, in 2007, more than 100,000 new titles were published in the UK.