The event saw over 30 book print firms and publishers mark their attendance at Welbound’s Thiruvananthapuram plant in Kerala.

P Sajith, marketing director, Welbound Worldwide, said, “The fast changing scenario in book production for long as well as short runs has made it imperative for the book printers to evolve and up the ante to add value to the printed books. The open house is a platform for book publishers, printers, binders and short-run print solution providers to discuss trends and opportunities in the field.”

The open house commenced with a walk through glimpse of the Welbound factory fully loaded with CNC part forming machines and assembly lines. The highlight was a project that Welbound has undertaken with the ISRO for metallurgical development of rockets.

This was followed by a visit to a book printing firm located 100 metres from the factory, where the participants could observe various Welbound products producing textbooks for Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu textbook society. This included Wohlenberg Lucro with Sprinter gatherer, Welbound’s perfect binders, folders, guillotines etc.

In the post-lunch session, the participants dialogued with Henkel’s Ashish Pradhan and Pearson’s Subhasis Ganguli. Pradhan in his presentation discussed challenges for the Indian print industry. He highlighted the best practices to be adopted to overcome these challenges.

Pradhan said, “Besides short runs and shrinking margins, the key challenges that need to be addressed are internal and external wastages and health and safety of the employees.” Pradhan stressed that printing is more than ink on paper. He said, “Customers are demanding value additions from products and services in terms of logistics and distribution. Those who will accept this challenge and convert it into opportunity by premiumising such value adds are the ones who will sustain.”

Pradhan also highlighted that Germany-based Henkel is a 16bn euro company of which 50% is adhesive business. He said, "All the small drops of adhesives, probably the two grams that go in a single book helps us to contribute 8bn euros, making Henkel, the world's largest adhesive manufacturer. In India, Henkel is worth over Rs 1,000crore  company of which 50% is industrial adhesives."

Speaking about the acceptance of PUR by the industry, Henkel’s Sandeep Pai, said, “The short-run market such as photobook has been a quick adopter of PUR bookbinding technology. After the initial struggle, we now see people have started realising the benefits of using PUR in terms of cost and time savings.”

He added, “It excites us when a printer like Mumbai-based Sahaya Print Services appreciates the technology; Sahaya now has entirely shifted to PUR.”

The highlight of the open house was an interaction between Subhasis Ganguli of Pearson and Ramu Ramanathan of PrintWeek India. Ganguli discussed the pain points in the book supply chain.

Ganguli said, “At Pearson, we have 16 printers on board. Faster turn-around times, health and safety norms, capacity and storage space to deliver just in time etc are some of the things we expect from our printers.”

In the session Ganguli put forth a tough question for printers. He asked, as a printer are we doing the right costing and taking it forward to the print buyer?

Ganguli said, “We follow the old school method of costing where the product cost is the sum of cost incurred for plate, plate, paper, production, binding etc. Instead, if we supply the product just in time on the basis of demand mapping and charge a premium for it considering the cost of product holding, cash-flow and investment, it will be a value addition to our products and the buyer can be convinced for the same.”

Ganguli also addressed the pressing issue of piracy in the publishing industry. He said, “We try to combat piracy legally, but its very expensive and difficult. Hence, we have implemented digital ways to combat piracy with the concept of chapters or e-singles.”

Ganguli highlighted how printers can play a proactive role in addressing shopfloor issues and bottlenecks and sustain profitably.

The open house concluded with live demonstrations conducted at the Welbound factory along side discussions with Welbound’s tech experts. The participants could observe a series of perfect binders with varying speed, configurations and gluing options and  a few "well-bound" book samples.