Print Vs Digital media

Great piece of advertisement used by Sun termed as "UK's best handheld in 40 years ".
The video shows the value proposition of print in contrast to digital media, e-book readers and other gadgets.

Webinar discusses the slow growth of variable data printing

“Just because this is a time of transformation doesn't mean that it's easy to sell transformational ideas. Economic uncertainty has reduced the audience for bold, grand rhetoric. Besides, even in boom times innovation is risky. Innovators often have to ease anxieties by sounding conservative while doing something radical.” – Rosabeth Moss Kanter, in her 15 minute competitive advantage blog.

I recently took part in a webinar (an interactive seminar using the Internet) on the topic -- Variable data printing, how far have we come? Looking at the adoption patterns of this new technology, the webinar was organized by RIT and the speaker for this session was Ms Patricia Sorce, chair of RIT’s School of Print Media and co-director of the Printing Industry Centre. The webinar mainly compared the level of acceptance of VDP applications in 2003, to those in the last several years, and explored the reasons why we have not seen the explosive growth that was predicted in the early part of this decade.
The webinar started with the comparing the results of research from RIT (2003), the results of the CMO council study in 2008, and the Infotrends comparison of that company’s trend results in 2003 and 2006. All three research analyses show pretty similar results – that there is only a small growth in the amount of personalized printing used in advertising from 2003 till now. This conclusion was presented to webinar participants to look for the possible reasons behind this less than expected growth. Participants from around the world suggested reasons such as -- too complex, printers don’t like change, lack of awareness, knowledge and understanding, too much work, the higher cost of personalization, database issues and the growth of the Internet. However, the reasons given by Sorce were slightly different.
According to Sorce lack of awareness in not an issue as the 2008 CMO study shows that “all the marketing executives were either planning to deploy or had already deployed a personalized campaign.” The next question according to her, which strikes everyone is that “do executives fail to see the benefits of this?” Again this is not likely to be a key impediment as the CMO council study shows that the majority of the marketer’s feel that personalised printing makes a big impact and increases effectiveness.
So the barriers according to CMO for integrating personalised communication within marketing programs are -– inadequate infrastructure (49%), lack of customer data and insight (46%), cost and complexity (43%), lack internal competency (27%) and limited by top management mindset (20%). The other reasons behind this small growth is the availability of cheaper and easy media such as internet with new developments like personalized URL’s are picking up. Taking the top two reasons, that is -- inadequate infrastructure and lack of customer data, Sorce says that sometimes you cannot capture enough qualitative data about individuals that give enough insights that can be linked to personalized campaigns.
Talking about the latest buzz on transpromo as the area of growth for VDP, Sorce feels that transpromo comes under the purview of IT, as it is only related with transactional documents and is not considered “personalised print” by marketing professionals.
Sorce concluded by saying that the simplest form of personalization is the best tactic for a marketing campaign and for high level personalization print campaigns to grow, a good data foundation married with strategy is essential.

Is digital printing really ready to take on offset in India?

Digital printing is generally promoted as a solution for variable printing or short run printing. At least among the vendors, there is a strong belief that –“Smaller quantities are best printed on a digital press.” We did one of our quick studies on this issue by comparing the viability of printing short run books in runs from 50 to 500 using either conventional offset and new digital production processes.

Our book specifications were: 200 pages; 100 gsm art paper; size – A4 (210 x 297 mm); and, quantities of 50, 100, and 500 copies. We got quotations for two type of books with the specifications remaining the same – a full monochrome book with cover printed in 4-colour process on both sides; and secondly, a full 4-colour process book with the cover also printed in colour printed on both sides.

To understand the pricing in the printing industry better we found out that digital printer apart from their capital costs, paper and overheads also pays the press manufacturer a click charge that includes the cost of ink and toner. The click charge in India is generally anywhere from Rs. 4 to 8 for an A3 sheet for all four colours and it represents the basic annuity business model of the manufacturers. Thus the per copy cost for one sheet or a thousand sheet remains the same although large volume users naturally enjoy increased discounts.

In case of an offset printing, apart from the capital cost and the overheads, the variable costs come from the prepress work including platemaking and the cost of consumables including paper, ink and chemicals. Thus once the press is made ready for a particular job, the actual printing is completed quickly and unlike digital printing the price reduces as the quantity increases.

We received quotations from several offset and digital printers in the Delhi NCR region for both colour and monochrome printing on the basis of our above mentioned specifications. These quotations were then averaged and analyzed.




The results of our micro study reveal that printing full colour books of 75 copies or less is more economical using digital presses than going the conventional offset route. However, in the case of monochrome book printing, offset printing is more economical for any quantity from 50 books up till 500 books. Of course this would hold true for higher quantities as well. The basic point seems to be that offset printers in India are extremely competitive and willing to print much shorter runs than in other markets.

The issues of quality and turnaround time are of course not dealt with in this analysis. However it is clear that digital printing once you are able to provide a print-ready PDF would be much faster as long as the digital print service provider also has the same postpress and binding ability as an offset book printer. As far as quality, recent surveys show that digital quality is increasing as acceptable if not better than offset.

Anniversaries

Last year was the 40th anniversary of some of the important events in Vietnam and also the 40th anniversary of important demonstrations, sit-ins and student occupations of college campus buildings in several countries -- as a part of the civil rights movement against racism and the anti-war movement. This summer brings the 40th anniversary of both the Woodstock music festival (I was also there) and the invention of the Unix operating system.

According to an article by Mark Ward published in this morning's Business Line, Unix was developed at Bell Labs after a joint effort by AT&T, MIT and GE failed miserably to build an ambitious multi-user system called Multics. Ken Thomson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs consequently with a lot of time on their hands decided to persist and it was in August 1969 that Thomson apparently wrote the core components of the operating system, shell, editor and assembler. It sort of helped that his wife was away visiting her family for a month.

The software started running on a DEC PDP7 and by the early 1970's five people were working on the OS which had been named Unix by Brian Kernighan who wanted to contrast Unix with the failed Multics. As they say the rest is history but the details can be interesting and software has played a large role in what is called globalisation. As far as I can see Unix has been crucial for the development of the Indian expertise in information technology. Although like almost everywhere the pioneer programmers used all kinds of assembly languages and Fortran on hardware from IBM, it seems to me (and I may be wrong) that it was the installation of the DEC PDP computers in the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and other scientific installations that really spawned a huge number of Unix and C-language programmers in the country.

For the most part the DEC PDP-10's came to the Institutes with Unix (and thirty or forty binders of documentation) but very little application software. And there were many young students and academics who were ready to spend days and nights and weeks in those tube-lit super-air-conditioned computer labs ready to learn Unix and to write all kinds of applications. I think that many of these students became formidable programmers and researchers. We met some of them during the 1970's and early 1980's in the course of the discussion of computers and non-Roman languages for the purpose of typesetting in Indian scripts. Publishing system developments in America were similarly influenced when an MIT grad student was motivated (and financed) to build the Atex editorial system that ran on the DEC PDP system.

This was the title of our first experimental blog

To be honest I have been too ambitious over the past couple of years and instead of just blogging tried to set up a whole set of blogging systems. The whole thing became a project together with the project of renovating our several websites. As could be expected it became an endless struggle while blogging has become like personal computing -- personal. In the meanwhile Facebook has arrived and then twitter and here I am just beginning my serious blogging while the rest of world is already going to the post-blog era. A bit like writing about printing when the whole world has gone to the radio, television, Internet, cellphone, blog and twitter. Nevertheless, it is interesting to try and span these communication and broadcast technologies -- there must be a continuum and hopefully one's evolution in dealing with it can be made somewhat interesting.

Since I decided two days ago to just do it rather than wait for some bespoke and perhaps ideal solution I realised that the tools are not only marvelous but also easily accessible. I confess that I have taken the help of one of my young colleagues who is tolerant of my sometimes beleaguered activities. In the process we have actually started two more blogs -- one for colour management and standardisation and the other for publishing. That leaves me with the problem or opportunity of what to do with this blog. I think it will be best if it is used for general topics that include some of the business issues such as the decline or pressure on print prices, the human resource issues and also environment and green printing. These are issues which are discussed at least on the telephone every day with the readers of our trade magazines.

Originally envisioned as a kind of CEO blog, my colleagues advised me a few weeks ago that the blogs that would be successful for our business would be those that are technical or 'how to' blogs. So we have done with the two other blogs started yesterday but in this one I hope and the blogging team will tolerate my continued obsessions with the Indian economy and the Delhi traffic which I see as a metaphor for both chaos and change.

Are we finally getting somewhere?

There is an old Laurel and Hardy movie where the two protagonists are carrying luggage and trying to find their way out of a maze (a gazebo made of hedges). After a great deal of going back and forth and around one corner and another and they come to some kind of a signpost. We know they are hopelessly lost but one of them says, "Now we're finally getting somewhere!"

This a bit like what I am feeling after trying to become a blogger for the last 20 months. We have made many fits and starts and are now more or less realising that its simpler than we thought. The technology is not that tough (after all every one is doing it) and that all the features that we need to create blogs for our print community are easily available and downloadable.

We expect in the next few days to invite our industry friends to take part in this and one other blog which will be a how to or technical blog on printing, colour management and standardisation. So instead of these sporadic sputtering get ready for day to blogs and comments from the print community in India and Asia.