Even when championed by savvy editors and hard-nosed sales staff, predicting sales of first-time authors is a gamble. Much depends on favorable reviews in Publishers Weekly, The New York Times, and other influential publications. In spite of positive endorsements, books still face a capricious public. They may become best sellers, but they often disappear in the flood of returns from bookstores. Printing smaller quantities via digital technology offers a safer way to test the waters for a lower initial investment and opens up the opportunity to publish more authors.

Michael DeFazio, VP, paper purchasing & production planning, Penguin Random House, said¹ his firm uses digital technology mainly for one-color text printing of backlist titles, as well as a smaller quantity of front list and first-printing books. For the front list, it might be a debut author, advance copies or a reissue of an existing book that may otherwise not have gone to production.

Each year, a steady stream of new titles written by professors and others in academia go into production. These books have limited scope, as most apply to specific disciplines, such as engineering, medicine, natural sciences or humanities, the most prolific category. Textbooks are well-suited to digital print technology. The ability to print per semester greatly increases academic publishers’ revenue by drastically reducing the used book market. As per-unit inkjet costs come down, Jean-François Lyet, technical director, Hacette Livre, believes his company will move a significant part of the four-color business for educational and academic books to digital.³

Hachette Livre prints 20 percent of their trade volumes with digital print technology. The remaining 80 percent of jobs are printed on traditional offset. Inkjet presses are used for quantities of 1 – 2,500, with traditional offset used for higher quantities. Because the inkjet/offset “quality gap” has closed so significantly thanks to technological advancements, this hybrid approach to shorter runs has added incredible flexibility to how publishers approach trade books.

Reducing warehousing costs is a driving force for publishers to embrace using digital print equipment wherever it fits, especially when book files can be seamlessly shared between book manufacturers and publishers. By taking advantages of new workflow automation techniques, publishers are able to leverage information mobility — the ability to capture, transform and manage information — to help keep these costs down.