The Romancing Print conference organized by the AIFMP continues to improve from year to year with improved turnout and quality of content. This year’s event created a discussion between book publishers and book printers.
A natural partnership that too often seems adversarial, this is an important discussion in light of the rapidly growing demand in the country for both text and general books.
The publishers at the session outlined challenges including those of rampant piracy with the help of unethical printers as well as the opportunities they see in improving efficiency with the use of print on demand (POD) and eBooks. Printers in turn reported a decline in demand for book print exports. One printer said that although sales had grown, it was profits that were under pressure.
Avijit Mukherjee of Ricoh, one of the sponsors of the event, said that digital printing is growing and in India in particular it was growing in combination with offset.He ventured to add, “Short run publishing and packaging will drive digital in the future.
” Peter Rego of Heidelberg, also a sponsor of the event, said that while digital is economical for short runs, in India offset becomes competitive only .
Nevertheless, he argued for innovation including web- to-print to take hold in India as a way of improving efficiencies of print marketing and sales. Rego also made clear that offset printing has a long life ahead of it but that it may require an industrialized approach to make it work cost effectively.
Not only does the entire production workflow need to be integrated and include a variety of technologies and processes, but also more automation is needed to bring additional finishing processes inline.
Print has to become more interactive where QR codes, RFID and other methods could be used to bring print into the realm of video, virtual reality and even 3D printing.
