High-speed Ink Jet and the Evolution of POD
“The incremental value of color versus black-and-white in a mobile world is $0" Eileen Gittins, Blurb’s CEO at Dscoop6, February 2011
In early 2009, on a trip to HP’s corporate office in San Diego, I first met Aurelio Maruggi, now HP’s VP and GM of Inkjet High Speed Production Solutions division. He showed me an early prototype of color printing on a yet-to-be-released new platform, which became the HP T-300 High-Speed Ink Jet press. It was on uncoated paper, it felt a bit like a color laser copy. But the die was cast: fast, cheap color running off of a print-on-demand (POD) digital front end (DFE).
At Blurb we have always been looking for ways to help our authors make money selling their stories. While one-color self-published POD had been around for a while, when Blurb was founded in 2005 we were the first to be all about color from the beginning. Illustrated books. Artist portfolios. Personal histories. Working along with our global network of printers, we revolutionized the color book market that had been the domain of digitally-printed photo albums. The result was the total disruption of that market, with prices falling by nearly half while raising the bar on product quality. This was achieved by triangulating the supply chain and with the support of our primary supplier, HP’s Indigo Press group.
But in 2009 we knew that sill was not enough. Even a book so much less expensive than before, with beautiful coated papers and stunning color, still was challenging for an author to mark-up and sell. Blurb’s guide from the beginning was that we needed our customers to be able to buy a hardcover, full-color book for a price that they would pay for a comparable volume in a brick-and-mortar bookstore. If you were buying a book you made for yourself, that goal had been realized. But if you were looking to market your creation to the public it was still challenging.
So when Aurelio showed me the printing from this new platform and told me it was using the same inkjet technology that HP’s desktop, photo-quality printers used I was very interested. In my mind the laws of computing and scale would take over—a press at its onset that needed need to run at 400+ feet per minute to create a workable ROI could eventually be slowed down (read: higher quality) as the technology improved and the prices decreased. Plus the promise of coated papers that would match higher-end offset printing made it clear of where the future was headed.
Today the T-Series HP presses are responsible for printing many of the one-color books you see in your local bookstore. And now, combining the continually improving quality along with new coated papers, Blurb has begun using this technology to print our standard magazine products for global distribution.
This does not mean we are moving away from the POD industry quality standard HP Indigo press, which has been the color platform of choice for over a decade. Speciality products with critical color will remain on the Indigo platform for years to come. But for book products that can be somewhat standardized and batched, high-speed ink jet creates a sea change for POD. I expect as this platform continues to evolve with the strong support of HP’s R&D, we'll see more and more color products moving there and also offering new opportunities for small publishers and authors to limit the investment needed to get their books in front of customers via the self-publishing route. This is what we've called the “Big Middle”—50 to 3000 copies which have traditionally been too high quantity for price-competitive color POD and too small to get the full benefit of offset runs.
This is what the democratization of self publishing looks like, and at Blurb we’re proud to be on the leading edge of helping millions of people worldwide to tell their stories in beautiful printed color as well as on digital devices. And, did I mention, they can make money too?
