Press Minding - All the news that’s fit for print

 "The network is the computer" is the mantra under which Sun Microsystems has conducted itself over many years. The thinking is that hooking up networked computing resources and delivering a slice of that power to wherever on the network it is needed is an extremely efficient method of getting more bangs for your buck out of your hardware. Sweating your assets, as they say.

Delete computer and replace with printer and you might have something similar to what News International is suggesting might be possible in a few years time for newspapers.

Printing at the point of distribution may turn out a savvy move, according to Ian McDonald, managing director of operations at News International, and you can see his point. If you're printing hundreds of thousands of copies centrally and then sending them out to small remote communities in, say, the north of Scotland, it would probably be cheaper to employ a local commercial print shop to produce the few thousand needed to serve that area.

McDonald says that digital presses are some way off being fit for such a purpose but that in time it could well mean the likes of News International installing digital presses in commercial printers on the condition that the newspapers are printed overnight, with the printer using the press for small commercial jobs at other times - in short a network of printers.

It appears the polar opposite of what is currently happening in the newspaper sector, with hundreds of millions of pounds spent on newspaper printing cathedrals, taking on commercial work to fill all that extra capacity.

But it's astute to consider the opportunities of the reverse, especially with advertising. It could mean a massive blow to regional newspapers. Ford for example, might welcome the opportunity to print dealer specific adverts local to where copies of nationals are being distributed - moreso perhaps in a national where they only need to deal with one person than many local gazettes. 

There's something reassuring about visiting manufacturing plants. I've spent so much of my professional life managing and presenting information that seeing something tangible being made makes a vital connection.

So walking into Fujifilm's Tilburg plate facility seeing that work was already underway on the near €100m PS10 plate line and third on the site, (due to come online toward the end of next year or start of 2010) puts a spring in one's step.

Tilburg is a good news story for European print. PS10 was originally to be built in China. But the sheer size of the European print industry caused Fujfilm to change that decision and make Tilburg the "largest offset plate production facility in the world," according Senior Supervisor Jack Schellekens.

The bosses in Tokyo have placed a lot of trust in Tilburg. For one thing Fujifilm Manufacturing Europe BV now has a European president - Peter Struik - something of a first in a world where many Japanese companies tend to ship in Japanese execs to head up their international divisions.

It also evidenced by the fact that PS10 will be producing Fujifilm's newest digital plates, both processless and chemistry-free, and more importantly, it is expected that a greater emphasis will be placed on R&D at the facility. The company is already working with a Polish university on research projects (it already employs a significant number of Polish staff). So while Tilburg will serve Europe, Africa, and potentially some areas beyond, it may also end up the source of entirely new plate products for global markets.

All this begs the questions why Europe, and specifically why Tilburg? To answer the first, while there may be fewer printers and less print volume, countering this trend is a greater use of short run work and colour. Plate volumes are up. For the second, Tilburg is situated on some of the purest water around, pumped up from 250m underground.


 

Turns out that while Amazon and Sony scrabble for the rights to own the e-reader market - such that it is - it could be the humble mobile phone that storms past into first place as the device of choice.

It makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Cost of entry: none - most of us own a mobile phone to start with so you don't need to come up with a spare £200 to take part. Plus the reading bill appears on your mobile statement, so you don't have to manage another set of transactions - which can be a real barrier to adoption.

In fact, this Forbes item suggests that Apple's iPhone is already proving more popular than the Kindle for reading books, with downloads of the free Stanza reading application outstripping Kindle sales by a long chalk.

But other mobile phone companies are also taking the idea seriously from a commercial "paid-for" point of view. Vodafone is to launch Vodafone Books on Mobile today, and are dodging the small screen, no e-paper problem by offering audio books at between £5 and £15 according to the Times. (Apparently Andy McNab is one of the names behind the project).

And finally France Telecom, which we know over here as Orange, is also trialling a mobile reader service - this time with a dedicated device.

Quite literally - the word in the world of Harry Potter fanzines is that the final movie (The Deathly Hallows) currently being filmed features a printing press based on a century old 10-ton Cossar flat bed web newspaper press. There's only one left in the world, belonging to David Phillips, from Crieff, Perthshire.

 The Times and The Guardian report today that police arrested three men on suspicion of plotting to murder the publisher of a controversial novel in a petrol bomb attack.

Martin Rynja is to publish Sherry Jones' The Jewel of Medina which reportedly contains a sex scene between Mohammed and his wife A'isha under his company Gibson Square Publishing.

The book was dropped by Random House earlier this year because the company was concerned it might anger muslims. Turned out it was right.

I don't know who has been contracted to print the book, but given what has befallen the publisher, it would most likely be unwise to publish the name here in any case.

However, the episode does pose questions for print-on-demand publishers. Given the direct model in operation - author uploads the book - buyer buys it - then are they effectively acting as publisher but with little or no vetting of what it is they actually publish?

This thorny issue has had a legal precedent already set in the US in terms of defamation in Sandler v. Calcagni. I'll let Mark Glaser precis it (from his Media Shift blog)

"The case started with a dispute between two high school cheerleaders over (what else?) a boy. According to the court’s opinion, one of the cheerleaders, Calcagni, and some of her friends harassed Sandler with religious epithets. Eventually, Calcagni was convicted of a hate crime for allegedly spray-painting a swastika near Sandler’s home.

"Calcagni’s parents decided to tell their side of the story with a tell-all book about the incident. They printed the book through BookSurge, and purchased several hundred copies, which they distributed to friends, family and local bookstores. Several other parties also purchased copies of the book online.

"Not surprisingly, Sandler sued Calcagni, her parents, the freelancer and BookSurge. BookSurge made a motion to dismiss the claims against it, arguing that it should not be held liable as a publisher for purposes of defamation law."

The court found that Amazon's BookSurge was not liable. Why? Because it had had little involvement with the author or the content of the book and so could not be considered publisher.

But it still leaves POD companies between a rock and a hard place. You either don't get involved at all and run the risk of arson attacks and who knows what else depending on what it is you are printing (remember, you DON'T know what it is - it could be anything), but in a (US) court not be held liable as publisher. Or vet what you print but face all the legal responsibilities of being a publisher.

I'm not sure I have an answer for that. 

 First off, I hold my hands up to the fact that what follows is actually something Richard Romano picked up on his blog.

It's from the Scientific American which features an article on augmented reality.  The article talks about how print media can be embedded with design cues that when viewed through a device such as the camera of a mobile phone, would trigger an event, such as running a video clip, or downloading other content from the web.

The technology has been applied to children's books by New York-based Media Power. The printed book comes alive when viewed through a mobile phone with three-dimensional animated characters that walk and talk their way through the pages.

Augmented reality like this could have all sorts of applications for print media, especially where it involves the ubiquitous mobile phone. Print ads could also use web assets so that an advertisement for a car, for example, could also offer the viewer a video of it in action and a three-dimensional view.

It could also be used in transpromo in a similar way, or could make a document more secure, so that certain information would only be revealed when a phone with a particular SIM was used to view it.

Direct mail could use it to push viewers directly to a personalised URL rather than hope they will turn on a computer and key in a web address, or to personalise non-personalised adverts (the advert might not know who you are, but your phone does).

The idea is to enrich the physical world with digital assets and with tens of millions of dollars spent each year advancing the technology, commercial applications are just around the corner.

Excuse the awful title to this title - no steaks involved - but the following heartwarming BBC article made me sit up. A homeless charity in Aberdeen has turned to the cash-rich world of commercial print to cover cut backs to its funding. The Cyrenians operate Iceberg Arts Design and Print studio out of a former toilet block using the skills of around 40 voluntary workers and, according to the Beeb, they're not making any money.

Let's just go through that again: a charity - working out of a toilet - with no labour costs - isn't making any money from the print trade.

And you wonder why the rest of the sector is struggling...

Yes, stupid. That's me. We're in a global financial meltdown. I'm not sure which bank I should be paying my mortgage to this or next month, and each might be different, so bear with my confusion.

On a print note, it turns out one of Lehman Brothers' creditors is RR Donnelley. It was important enough to have been appointed to a committee of creditors hastily put together to represent creditors' interests after the Barclays deal. But now it has made a statement saying it had less than $1m out to the company and resigned its position.

According to reports, Lehman Brothers had debts of $613bn. RR Donnelley "exposure" of $1m in trade accounts receivables hardly puts it on the radar compared to other creditors, let alone give it a seat on the Lehman Unsecured Creditors Committee. Do people not spot these things?

One of the interesting aspects to come out of a recent interview I had with one of HP's scientists on the work they were doing on de-inking inkjet print was that it's really no big deal.

HP senior scientist for inkjet R&D and environmental strategy Nils Miller was reasonably cagey about how far down the road HP actually is on de-inking inkjet, but the nub of it is that it can be done. A special bonding agent is added during the print process to cause the ink particles to come together. This means they sit on top of the paper rather than dissolve into it, improving print quality, but also means they are now the right size to be dispersed of the paper using standard flotation processes.

All jolly good, but then I spoke to the European paper manufacturers' body INGEDE which is charged with promoting the use of recycled paper.

They had actually seen the results of HP's efforts and were considerably impressed. In fact a spokesperson described paper recycled from HP inkjet web press prints as "better than that of offset newspapers". Not bad from the association that only in February condemned inkjet as "a gross aberration" in a world where environmental concerns are so high.

But there's a big but coming. The HP method only works with pigment inks. Liquid toners, dye etc won't benefit. "Liquid toner is still a major problem," said the spokesperson.

HP said it would develop de-inking techniques with the Digital Print De-inking Alliance (with Kodak, Oce and Infoprint) in the open and not look to patent or charge for use (although it said it would take information that comes out of the alliance back to see how it could be applied to its own portfolio of products).

Dry toner remains relatively easily de-inkable, but this clarification from INGEDE might mean this whole de-inking issue becomes a boost rather than barrier to inkjet.

Now if only HP had been able to talk about this before the "inkjet" Drupa where it launched the web press. 

Interesting piece on the wires that caught my eye - HP suing a German inkjet cartridge manufacturer over selling new cartridges, as remanufactured cartridges. Presumably the green glint of remanufactured cartridges meant that they were more desirable, although I suspect we're some way off seeing charity shops selling second-hand clothes at higher prices than new.

But it shows how serious the environmental issue is to HP, not just from a humanitarian/CSR point of view, but also as a hard-nosed business issue. It invests a huge amount of resources into methods of recycling and remanufacturing its equipment and doesn't want remanufacturing tarnished with these sharp practices.

To cut to the chase, HP wins and the world is saved from a world where brand new goods masquerade as remanufactured.

I often wonder whether we've overcooked the whole green debate, whether we've talked it up too much for too long. But HP here thinks its remanufactured products are a business line worth protecting. So perhaps I'm wrong and, even in these penny pinching days, consumers still take the green choice and prefer and value print manufactured in an environmentally sound manner. I hope so.

 

You could be forgiven that being in a struggling sector in a struggling economy is not an encouraging sign. But I got hold of a report from Global Industry Analysts that suggests the European commercial print industry will be robust enough to continue healthy investment in new kit over the next few years.

The Printing Machinery and Supplies report claims to take into account the impact of the Internet, consolidation, changes in the advertising industry, emerging economies and digital printing and still maintains the market value will grow 8% in Europe between now and 2010 to sales of $10.9bn (£6bn) representing 45.8% of the global market.

In short, sales of printing equipment, and Europe's share of that market, are on an upwards trajectory despite the bearish predictions of recession.

The only caveat to this is that the company has given its research an error margin of plus or minus 10%!

 

One article that kicked up a storm on the forums of late has been the BPIF's response to Sainsbury's decision to send out its latest company financials to shareholders electronically. BPIF chief executive Michael Johnson described the move as greenwashing a cost-cutting exercise.

Quite how you present Sainsbury's move is somewhat redundant (you could argue that Sainsbury's is taking its green remit very seriously as it is also now printing receipts on both sides).

Our printweek.com poll on the issue showed that 9 in 10 of our readers expect more companies to file accounts electronically, rather than sticking with paper, and this is backed up by the Securities and Exchange Commission in the US that is urging companies to use a new format called XBRL to file accounts. This allows shareholders to view financial data side by side with that of other companies. It makes the data more useful in electronic form than in print.

What's more telling is that one of the key backers of this is none other than RR Donnelley. A spokesperson told me: "As we provide this expertise, we strengthen our relationships with our customers, create opportunities to become involved further upstream in their financial reporting processes, and better position RR Donnelley to provide a full range of financial services – from virtual data rooms to printed communications." In short, "get with the program".

The body covering how companies report in the UK is the Financial Reporting Council. They say they are well aware of the benefits of XBRL but have yet to formulate a policy on its adoption.

They say the US sneezes and the UK catches a cold. It seems inevitable that printing company accounts increasingly become an on-demand business.
 

The Olympics kicked off today. 08/08/08 - an auspicious date for any event. And the opening ceremony in Beijing made sure that the world knew the host China could put on a good show.

The opening act celebrated the role of China in changing the world in which we live.  After a blast of national song and fireworks the first scene of the ceremony was dedicated to the Chinese invention of paper, the second to its invention of movable type (some 400 years before Gutenberg).

Yes, inventing the media and mechanism for the mass distribution of information is certainly worth celebrating.

But it's useful to reflect that even as China can't get paper fast enough to print out books for the rest of the world, so it is using its political muscle to suppress rather than free information.

One of printweek.com's regular contributors in the forums Clive Keeble pointed out how the Chinese authorities are cracking down on books printed - even for international markets - that reference the idea of Tibet's independence. 

The Olympics are never just about sportsmanlike behaviour and the spirit of fair play. And this opening ceremony throws into sharp relief that China's Olympian ideal, despite its efforts to dictate that people smile more and clap in a certain manner, will fare no better.

Napster, KaZaA, Morpheus, BitTorrent. The scourge of the music and film industry has set course straight for the shores of print.

<rolls eyes>Students</rolls eyes>. Yes, they didn't like paying for music, resulting in a flood of traffic to filesharing sites. Now there's other stuff they don't like paying for.

Textbooks - according to the NYT, one text book file-sharing site has already been bullied out of existence, but others, such as Sweden-based Pirate Bay is resolutely refusing to take down copyright content.

And magazines - Mygazines.com has incurred the wrath of publishers and the PPA after they were spotted sporting free digital copies of the likes of GQ and FHM. Unfortunately the site is registered in Anguilla in the Caribbean and hosted somewhere in the US, making tracking down the culprits rather tortuous.

Not wanting to be a doom and gloom merchant, this does have marked parallels with the Internet sharing of music and movies and the iPod moment - when someone finally cracked a robust means of delivering physical product electronically.

What's grim about making textbooks and magazines walk the plank is that they are disposable products.

Much like movies, they have a limited lifespan. Once you've passed your exam, for most people textbooks are no longer needed. Likewise, magazines are only of value until the next issue arrives.

Books of fiction are more like music - you'll have a set of favourite works or tracks that you'll keep on using so you're more likely to value having a physical library of either.

But unlike movies, textbooks and magazines don't have a venue designed to appreciate them - the equivalent of a cinema.

Is it likely that they'll follow in the wake of the newspaper industry? ie swimming with the fishes. Probably and almost certainly in the case of textbooks - an electronic format means they can be rented for the given period a student needs it and continuously updated. A stunning glossy taking pride of place on the coffee table will be around for a lot longer to come though.

Here's an interesting research note - Nanomarkets predicts revenues from what what it calls "building integrated photovoltaic materials" will double between 2013 and 2015 - from $4bn to $8bn.

It says that most of the installations will be rooftop but that facade solar panels will account for 10% of the total power capacity of installations.

In other words, walls. One roof, four walls. Four times the market? Maybe.

It suggests curtain walls, building cladding and atrium glass as possible products.

"Solar cladding is a very competitive alternative to conventional cladding materials and is claimed to provide similar aesthetics to marble and bronze but at a fraction of the cost. Solar curtain walls present a special opportunity since they are easier to receive planning permission and permits for compared with conventional roof-mounted PV," it said.

You can already print different finishes such as wood grain onto a substrate. You can also print solar panels. Could you print the whole thing in one pass? It's got inkjet written all over it hasn't it?