Digital books can counter the China syndrome

On the face of it, digital book printing ought to tick so many boxes that it’s a foregone conclusion for all but best-sellers. But it ain’t necessarily so. To big publishers the price per unit is the be-all and end-all. This means long runs printed on litho presses, producing big batches that are warehoused until they are sold, and which are subject to returns from bookshops that are then wastefully scrapped. In pursuit of this model they’re switching production to China and India, where labour is cheap, and driving long-established British book printers to the wall. Expect a backlash before too long when environmental audits show up the carbon burden of using coal-fired Chinese electricity to print books half a world away, and then hauling them back on oil-burning container ships.

An obsession with unit costs may work for best-sellers, but leads to a vicious circle where big publishers believe that they only make money from best-sellers and start to regard new authors as unproven risks rather than investments in the future.

Small specialist publishers and the scientific, academic and technical press aren’t hampered by business models based on best-sellers: they’re used to selling low volumes and were quick to latch onto the lowset- up costs and economic short runs that digital offers. So we chatted to a few of them about their attitudes and experiences of digital printers.

Naval & Military Press is a successful publisher in Uckfield, East Sussex, that specialises in getting military history books back into print and keeping them there. The company was set up 12 years ago and currently has about 2,000 titles on its books, which can be all be ordered on-line, after which they are printed on-demand.

 “We take out-of-print and out-of-copyright books, scan them, and print by either Antony Rowe or Lightning Source,” explains director Chris Buckland. “We work with organisations like the Imperial War Museum or the Royal Armoury in Leeds. Our ethos is to get thousands of books on-line.”

The company has just introduced a new imprint, Rediscovery Books, which works along the same lines but republishes titles from the Royal Geographical Society and the Institute of British Geographers. So far it has about 50 titles in print. Often the original books will have significant antiquarian value, worth up to several hundred pounds, Buckland says, which tends to restrict the potential readership. Republishing them on-demand means that supply always meets demand and prices are similar to newly published works.

The books are all scanned (an outsourced operation) and reproduced as facsimiles, though the covers or jackets are always new and there are changes to the copyright and printing details on the publisher's pages or end papers.

Once they are digitised the books can be output ondemand by either Antony Rowe in Eastbourne or Lightning Source in Milton Keynes, which also fulfil the website orders. “We will print for stock if we think there will be a demand,” Buckland says. Gardners, the big book distributor in Eastbourne, keeps a handful of all the company’s titles in stock for supply to bookshops, but Internet orders to its own websites or to others such as Amazon.com are fulfiled on-demand and dispatched by the two printers.

Buckland has found a bit of a divide among digital printers. “People who say they are print-ondemand often are not, they are short-run,” he explains. “PoD should be the ability to print a single copy and get it out within 72 hours.” This is needed to meet the requirements of Amazon.com for its associate publishers.

Galore Park Publishing is a specialist publisher of schoolbooks for independent schools, based in Tenterden, Kent. It was set up four years ago by Nick Oulton, who had spent ten years as a Classics teacher. He set up Galore Park Publishing in 2003 when he found that he couldn’t find any textbooks worth teaching from which were less than 30 years old. So, starting with Latin, Oulton’s passion, Galore Park has steadily increased its range of textbooks and now publishes courses in Maths, Science, English, Spanish and French for pupils aged 10-16. 

It has about 70 titles on its books and is about to double this with a contract to distribute the titles of the Independent Schools Examination Board. Galore Park’s books are now used by about 80% of independent prep schools and an ever-increasing number of senior schools, as well as individual parents and pupils.

Louise Martine is a director at Galore Park Books, responsible for production. She says that the company uses a mix of digital print and conventional offset printers. “We digitally print in runs of 200, 300 or 500 at a time,” she says. “We print for stocks that we keep in the warehouse until they’re sold. What we don’t do is use it for just-in-time or on-demand ordering. It’s for replenishment of stocks.” 

Sales are fairly seasonal, mainly geared to the start of the new school year in September. Where print order volumes are low it’s because there’s only limited demand for a particular title, rather than the steady trickle of sales associated with just-in-time ordering. She also finds that printers quote high prices for justin- time ordering.

“They’re only small books, so there’s not much warehousing space needed, and if they don’t sell one year I’ll sell them another year. So there’s no point in printon- demand for us.” 

The company’s full-colour books are sold in thousands, so conventional litho is used, Martine says. Galore has used CPI’s Bath Press colour litho book operation in previous years, but this has just been closed in the face of price competition from the Eastern Europe and the Far East. This left Galore with a bit of a dilemma for the forthcoming school year, she says. “Because of the closure I’ve put a pitch out to 17 printers worldwide to see where I can place my work. European prices are nothing special but the delivery times are good. The only real savings are in India or China. But there’s an eight or nine week wait for delivery. We are revving up for September’s start of the academic year and I didn’t have eight weeks to wait, so for this year I went to Europe.

Just-in-time or PoD has potential, she concedes, but “it’s the cost per unit and the limitation of sizes they can print. If they can get the costs right down, then theoretically it’s very attractive for a publisher not to have to sit on a pile of stock. I’ve talked to CPI Antony Rowe in Eastbourne and Lightning Source about PoD. All our books are held electronically, so we can switch over if required.”

 If a medium-volume publisher like Galore is ambivalent about the value of digital print, one small publisher has no doubts at all about its value. Peter Danckwerts is MD of Tiger of the Stripe, based in Richmond, Surrey. Billing himself “London’s most eclectic publisher,” Danckwerts tends to republish poetry, histories and translations from the 19th Century, often of medieval subjects. The books are either printed straight from scans of the originals, or re-set from scratch – OCRs can’t cope with the multiple languages and strange type characters often found in these books.

Digital printing makes this sort of antiquarian re-publishing viable as a business rather than a loss-making hobby. Most of the books are printed by Lightning Source, though Danckwerts has also used Antony Rowe in the past. He says that Lightning Source’s new Océ book printing lines produce better halftones than its original IBM 4000s.

“All printing is on-demand, except for those cases where I have an order for say 50 copies and then it’s short-run,” Danckwerts says. He prefers to deal with Lightning Source to handle sales though Amazon. “You can have a merchant account with Amazon, but they take a big cut. If you go through Lightning Source they take less of a percentage and they handle everything with no worries.”

Traditional publishers who only want best-sellers and impose stringent terms on new authors are in danger of cutting off the supply of fresh talent, because now there’s an alternative way to market. Digital printing and on-line storefronts allow authors to completely bypass traditional publishers, distributors and shops, by arranging for their own books to be published , sold and fulfiled on-line.

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