"High-speed digital web will be the fastest-moving print sector in India," says Aniruddha Khandekar of Repro India

It seems that India will soon be picking up with digital print announcements on high-speed inkjet web printers. It won’t be a complete surprise as these devices represent an impressive technical feat. Their speeds surpass the more established toner printing systems by a factor of 5-10.

This is all down to the use of page-wide inkjet, which a few years ago was dismissed because it was not economically feasible to produce and use. The device class is one of the very few hardware segments that remain unaffected by the volatility in other segments of printing. That said, it has never been entirely clear who is most likely to buy these devices. The quality and running cost capabilities of high-speed continuous-feed process colour printers would seemingly make them attractive to the transaction and direct mail markets, but with improvements in quality and paper latitude, devices are moving into publication environments and are finally reaching out to all kinds of offset print – including book printing.

Repro India has been a pioneer when it comes to enhancing their book printing business with digital. Repro boasts of an impressive setup of digital machines that include a high speed web monochrome digital printer along with five sheetfed digital printers (four monochrome and a high-end colour printer) coupled with a world class digital facility that has been setup with meticulous effort and leadership. Repro’s digital operation has been set up with great thought in terms of its existing market reach as well as the overall company vision for digital production in India. With the current digital print capabilities, it can print almost 14 lakhs A4 duplex impressions per day, which translates into approximately 4,700 books considering an average size of 300 pp/book. In the Print-On-Demand (POD) segment within India this surely is a considerable daily capacity.

However, over the last few months, a tremendous focus on instilling lean Six Sigma principles and concepts in day-to-day operations within the digital production process has led to several process improvements in terms of productivity, reduction in defective quality, increase of on-time delivery (which is perhaps the most important aspect of POD), minimal WIP between work centres thereby leading to a very productive environment with high employee morale, and a ferocious appetite for new product as well as customer development. This has allowed Repro India to slowly but surely increase the quantity of books that can be run profitably on their digital machines vis-a-vis offset technology. Furthermore, the digital platforms allows a much greener process in terms of lower carbon emissions, lower paper waste since we can print exact number of books in whole rather than printing forms and then folding and gathering as required by offset, lower use of hazardous chemicals since there are no litho plates and CTP systems.

These aspects were a strong proponent of Repro choosing digital as its path ahead and be poised for growth with correct environmental principles and ethics. Overall India is not different in its demand for print compared to the rest of the world in terms of "value". I define value strictly based on what the customer wants most, not what the supplier wants to sell or convince the customer with! In India the POD market has slightly different requirements that the conventional POD market in western countries. The key elements of POD are lead time, ability to produce exact quantity desired, quality of product as per customer’s need and managing delivery across various destinations without any central warehousing need! Based on the end customer and the industry they participate in, the chronology of which aspect is most important will vary!

I can say with utmost confidence that we in India will see more digital print in book printing, as runs get shorter, obsolescence gets harder to justify and publishers’ backlists keep growing. However, in my opinion, digital printing cannot challenge the basics of offset technology. Perhaps the one big mistake that printers tend to make is compare two printing processes for cost, quality, productivity and effort. One mustn’t forget that each process was developed with certain principles in mind. For example, it will be insane to imagine printing a large run (book quantity > 10,000) on digital machines of present. In future this will be a certainty, but not at present. In the meantime, one should not lose out on the opportunity to use inkjet digital for shorter runs where offset cannot make headway. One can work wonders by combining the values of two different processes to complement each other. I foresee a large investment in digital presses by offset printers, in order to bridge the gap between technology "short-run" demands of the customer. Plus, the advantages of being an environmentally friendly printer once you have a digital infrastructure is tremendous.

At one of the major print events held in USA in 2009, a calculation was done for comparative costs of book production using continuous-feed inkjet printing for a soft-cover oversize A4 112-page four-colour book printed offset on a B1 eight-unit (four-over-four colours) press compared with printing on a 20in width web inkjet press. The point at which offset became cheaper was 3,458 copies. With a wider width of 30in it could have gone over 4,000 copies. A major differentiating factor, however, was that, using offset technology, this would take 30 hours to print, where as using web inkjet it would take four hours and much fewer operators/manpower. One tends to compare just the print aspects, but forgets to evaluate the cost of the total value-stream, that is from the receipt of inputs to delivery. In case of offset, one deals with CTP systems and plates, storage of plates for re-use prior to printing, setups and changeover processes during printing, post-press activities such as folding, gathering and manpower associated with these processes.

One key aspect of enabling good success with inkjet web presses is to ensure that there is adequate capacity and capability at the finishing end of your process. Companies have opted so far to go off-line with their binding requirements, but I foresee a major shift in this mentality in the next couple of years. Binding equipment manufacturers are closely watching the development and fast track growth of inkjet digital and hence are trying to cement their place on this growth train by partnering with all the major inkjet manufacturers. Since the inkjet platforms are trying to cater to the short-run and print-on-demand segments, it becomes all the more imperative for binding capabilities to be in sync with the speeds of inkjet web such that these two aspects of can tie together and form one in-line process.

Imagine the power of getting a finished book printed digitally and bound at 650 fpm! That’s where we as an industry are headed!