The Verdigris blog by Laurel Brunner
Printing companies, print buyers, print users, all of us are stuck in a sustainability rut. Recent technology advances, mainly in inkjet printing and finishing, follow massive upheavals digital technology has wrought on all three communities, and have made the industry more sustainable. Increased commercial sustainability has definitely driven increased environmental sustainability, but not everywhere in the graphics business.
For many years we’ve had the technology to minimise waste, optimise production efficiencies and energy usage; publishing companies have adapted their business models to exploit it. In the newspaper and magazine sectors the subscription model seems to be working well, and a reasonable balance exists between print and digital content delivery. In the sign and display market there is clever leveraging of online and printed versions of content intended to inform as well as direct. The labels and packaging sectors are obviously immune to any digital equivalents, but here too we see a healthy marriage of digital messaging and printed delivery. In all of these examples, commercial imperatives drive technology uptake. Environmental sustainability goes hand in hand with commercial, and even societal sustainability.
But in book publishing, it is a different story. Book publishers and distributors are still far too wedded to the mass production model for the sector to really move ahead with sustainability. There are lots of pledges and initiatives doing their best to encourage change, but we see very few signs of progress. This may be because of a lack of understanding of the economics of print amongst publishers. Traditional printing economics once favoured long print runs which printing companies obviously prefer to short ones. Why would they suggest to a book publisher that there are more sustainable business models, if it means less revenue for the printing company? They wouldn’t of course.
It used to be that the cost of typesetting (remember that) and creating plates was such that unit costs would be very high, if the print run was short; it was even more expensive if colour was involved. Also the cost of printing set up favoured long runs: getting the press to print to the required quality could take as much as a thousand sheets, depending on coverage, colour and expectations. Automation on press was nothing like as sophisticated as it is today, and good results mostly depended on the skill of the press operator. The cost of production was steep and, along with the cost of substrates for the run, was factored into the cost of the job. If the run was long the costs were spread over many copies. This outmoded model continues to dominate book publishing, but it makes no sense today especially not in the context of sustainability.
Book publishers obviously want to make as much money out of a title as possible, so there is incentive to print as many copies as they think they can distribute and hopefully sell. Erring on the side of caution is not the preferred option because unit costs are relatively low for a long print run. And if publishers end up with a load of unsold copies those copies can be sold as waste, to be pulped and recycled, all of which generates income somewhere in the supply chain. But this isn’t good for environmental sustainability. Far better to avoid the waste in the first place.
Access to Word et al has been hugely beneficial for book publishers. An enormous number of titles are authored and published for increasingly splintered readerships. And yet the arguments for on demand digital printing appear not to be heard by the big publishing companies. Nor does there seem to be much inclination to take active control of production to develop an integrated print plus online strategy. A more robust appreciation of the technology choices and the break even points for specific formats and run lengths, digital versus conventional printing, would be a start towards greater sustainability in book publishing.
Technology advances in prepress, printing systems, networks and finishing are about opportunity. Process automation and artificial intelligence continue to enhance production management, and technology provides book publishers, especially the smaller independents, with far more options than in the past. For instance moving to a sell-then-print model could work well for debut fiction where print runs are mostly less than one thousand copies. The number of copies that end up in the hands of buyers sold via bookshops with traditional models, depends on the publisher’s marketing spend and its effectiveness. This depends on the author and title, but you can be pretty sure that for literary fiction and poetry the numbers for both the print run and the marketing spend will be low. The traditional production and distribution model is bad for the planet and for the industry’s reputation and it doesn’t have to be that way. All it takes is greater appreciation of the technology, judicious investment and business models that have environmental sustainability at heart.
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This article was produced by the Verdigris Project, an industry initiative intended to raise awareness of print’s positive environmental impact. This weekly commentary helps printing companies keep up to date with environmental standards, and how environmentally friendly business management can help improve their bottom lines. Verdigris is supported by the following companies: Agfa Graphics, EFI, Fespa, Fujifilm, HP, Kodak, Miraclon, RicohSplash PR, Unity Publishing and Xeikon.
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