Drupa, the printing industry’s largest fair (held every four years in Düsseldorf) has ended … and this ‘brief tale’ turned into an assignment - fortunately, finished now: off line and in the hands of the client. Meanwhile, visit the site, it’s worthwhile:

Drupa

So this tale of books got left behind in the middle ages when my report was advancing into the future - would digital printing finally take over? What will it mean to us, as authors?

17 century printing shop

Johannes  Gutenberg’s invention of the press with movable type was a remarkable step forward.  His first production run - 200 illustrated copies of the Bible - ran off his press in 1455.  It was a huge success (but though Gutenberg had planned it as a business venture he was not himself to see any profit from it).

The world was ready for change at that time. Literacy was very low (tapestries and stained glass windows still told tales to the majority of people) - but would increase very quickly.  In art, science and philosophy there would be a  revival of classical knowledge (specially Greek and Roman) … almost everything was evolving, for many at the time “too fast to be any good”. But Gutenberg’s technology would remain more or less unchanged until the nineteenth century. Books did become cheaper and more accessible but reached a plateau as the cost of setting up each page remained slow and laborious - but once arranged the cost would be inversely proportional to the number of copies run off.

Though the plate pressed to paper has been replaced by a  sheet wrapped around a rotating drum, and instead of inking directly another intermediary drum is used (offset printing) - the process is still analogue:

MAN Roland offset printing press

Usually, an image of each page is transferred to a soft rubber blanket or roller cover - as the flexible material conforms better to the texture of the paper, there’s a sharper type. But for each page (no matter the number of copies) there has been an inked analogue set up (by computer nowadays) … and the cost of ink and paper is marginal once the print run is under way.

A newspaper’s daily circulation can be about five million copies in the West (and in Japan a remarkable twelve million!), a weekly magazine may be a few hundred thousand.

Obviously books are printed, bound and finished at a much statelier pace. But the setup cost is still distributed over the number of copies made.

So with this (the most common) technique, offset printing, a publisher gins most the longer the run - that can be sold of course!

Distribution costs (the other big item in a publisher’s budget) have depended on location.  These have been soaring, and are likely to do so more in the near future. One way  to reduce this is cost to spread printing presses around as close as possible to the main sales outlets, as in major cities (or within different English speaking countries in this language’s case).  But then the advantage of the long runs off a single press is lost.

Enter digital printing - big brothers of the  computer printer, they would hardly fit either you desktop or your budget as they may be twenty yards long and cost about a quarter of a million dollars: printing one sheet off a digital is much like the home printer though - the cost is directly proportional to the number of copies made …

Hewlett Packard Indigo Digital Printer

So far digital printing has not been able to compete with analogue (offset) printing but that may be about to change - improved technology  and as in all electronic devices, economics of scale have made it a reasonable proposition - and, as the cost is no longer spread over the number of copies made, digital printing is more flexible with the length of the runs.

An attractive advantage for Print on Demand publishing, where the book doesn’t have to exist until after it’s bought (so zero inventory as soon as bookstores catch up with the idea).

Digital, as shown at this years Drupa can improve on offset’s colour quality and has sharper images. Where digital printers fall behind (by a factor of more than ten) is speed: They are too slow for now to be considered for ‘ephemeral’ publications, as daily newspapers,  or weekly magazines. There are however other intriguing advantages - Xerox showed a new gel-ink technology, more precise and more economical than present inks.

So what does all this mean for writers? I think there may be increased opportunities for beginners - much as in the e-books (such as the Amazon Kindle and others reviewed below) publishers have less investment in the author’s work and could be more willing to run risks on those that don’t have names that push the best-seller lists. The down side is that there will be more ‘junk’ on the market - and the responsibility for good editing will be much more the writer’s, than the large publishing houses with their gatekeeper editors.

Time will tell. Certainly not as long as the Lascaux Cave paintings or the Bayeux Tapestry but a whole lot easier per published copy, even if not as long lasting.

Q