When Rupert Murdoch upped sticks and de-camped with his newspapers to Wapping in London’s Docklands during the early 1980s, it proved that even the most traditional of industries could not escape the advancing technology. Typesetting has increasingly become a thing of the past as more and more printing companies are having to abandon their old equipment in favour of fully-automated kit just to remain competitive. Now the Internet has been brought into the equation and the printing industry has gone global. Rank Xerox UK Ltd kick-started the move in 1990 with the launch of the DocuTech printer. The machine was an attempt to edge its way into the commercial offset printing business, targetting high quality short-run jobs. DocuTech was the first ever 600 dots per inch machine to print 135 pages per minute in black and white though other companies have since matched the performance.
Innovative
The fully integrated digital device scans 24 pages per minute from documents dropped into the top of the machine, so there’s no need to wait and feed each page through individually. Documents are stored digitally on a 2.4Gb disk, so an intelligent queuing system can be set up. Multiple jobs are held as an archive and can be easily manipulated by the user, with several jobs handled at any one time. Each job is automatically saddle-stitched or thermal-bound, although there is an optional perfect-binder available. That was 1990. It isn’t so much that the technology has advanced. The DocuTech is still basically the same piece of kit putting marks on paper, but today its being used in a far more innovative way. There are 700 machines in use in the UK today. The Basingstoke Press (75) Ltd, based in that Hampshire town, uses eight DocuTechs at a cost of #200,000 each, alongside its more conventional Heidelburg presses. Initially this meant the company could accept printing jobs from clients on disk in either Tiff or PostScript format. The digital machines are all linked up to the company’s local network. At its most basic level this meant jobs could be initiated and manipulated from a desktop computer. In 1992 Basingstoke linked up to the Internet, a move that has paved the way for radically different production techniques. A modem remains the cheaper option for receiving local work, but managing director Gordon Hill said the majority of clients outside the area now send their print jobs digitally via Compuserve and the Internet.
By Louise Williams
This alone is not exactly revolutionary behaviour, with companies around the globle increasing taking advantage of the so called information highway. What is interesting about The Basingstoke Press is the International Printers Network. This links 16 printing companies in Europe, Austrailia and the US. Each one uses identical Xerox DocuTechs. If one of the US companies wins a contract to be delivered to Europe, the client’s print job is sent via the Internet to the network member closest to the work’s final destination. Shipping costs are instantly knocked out of the equation, saving what could amount to thousands of dollars for a tranatlantic trip. In theory, 20 minutes after a file has been sent from the client it can be on a press halfway around the world, and passed to a neighbouring site if the machines at one plant are full. Gordon Hill estimates that up to 50% of all printing costs reside in warehousing and shipping. If this even comes close to the actual figure, potential savings are enormous. The beauty of the network lies in its simplicity. All 16 companies use the same kit, and so produce identical results, even down to the level of ink coverage on a page. Whoever wins the initial contract claims a handling fee for passing on the work. In turn, the client gets his work well ahead of schedule, and everybody benefits. A job going through Basingstoke’s site at the moment has been sent digitally from the US via a Network partner. Approximate savings of 25.8% at #66,000 have been made in shipping costs and lower levels of paper wastage compared with hav
ing the job printed in the US and delivered to Europe. It is also five days faster. Hill is the first to admit it has not been a particularly smooth ride. The International Printers Network was very slow to get off the ground and even now they find themselves experimenting with different production techniques, and the system still has its limitations. The Docutech is equipped to handle only paper between the size of 8 by 10 to 18 by 12, and while there are no limits to the size of print job undertaken, it is still cheaper to mail disks containing enormous files through the post rather than distributing them over the Internet. But the system is managing to carve itself a niche in the market. The maximum print run Hill does at any one time is 100 copies. Since the company specialises in technical manuals where specifications and prices are constantly changing, the capability to do short runs is invaluable. It would not be worth even switching your Heidelburg on for 100 copies.
Edu-Course
In the US, Edu-Course packs are are becoming popular. Instead of buying expensive course books containing only a couple of relevant chapters, students can have individual texts scanned in from hard copies or taken from the Internet, printed and bound to create unique, highly-relevant books for their studies at a fraction of the cost. Gartner Group Inc recently estimated printing and publishing to be the single biggest application on the Internet with an approximate value of $57,000m, which gives some idea of the size of the market. As far as Edu-packs go in the UK, the copyright laws are too complex to follow the US example at the moment and the education sector appears content to use Docutech systems as conventional printers, but it is still relatively early days. Hill needs no futher convincing. Basingstoke’s turnover was #6m last year. As soon as a high standard digital colour machine comes on the market, he said, I’m buying.
