Arandell Job Fair

The next phase of growth for digital color printing will be using inkjet to print offset-quality images on coated stocks, at reasonable costs. The target applications are direct mail, catalogs, collateral and magazines. Digital color pages continue to grow nicely: up 15% in North America in 2016. Looking at the growth in more detail, one can readily see that the page volume growth is being driven by high-speed, continuous-feed color inkjet. Pages produced on webfed presses have been increasing at ~20% per year in recent years, double the rate of growth of cut-sheet pages, resulting in half of the total volume being inkjet output. So what’s being printed on these production inkjet web presses? The common denominator is documents on uncoated stock and that don’t require high-quality images: transactional documents, direct mail letters and books. The economics of transactional printing and direct mail letter printing now favor white paper feeding a full-color inkjet web press versus preprinted forms with mono laser overprinting. And, for books, the focus is shifting from the print cost per book to the cost of books sold. Click Read More below for more of the story.

When defining the outlook for book manufacturing in the year ahead, John Galligan, president of Bradford & Bigelow in Newburyport, Massachusetts, uses an apt analogy considering the topic at hand: “It’s a tale of two cities,” he says. Galligan is referring to the marked difference between the outlook at the beginning of this year to the outlook now, with regard to the ongoing supply chain challenges. In Printing Impressions’ Book Manufacturing Outlook for 2021, demand outstripping supply was already emerging as a leading concern, and as the Book Manufacturers Institute (BMI) published its "State of the Book Industry 2021," Executive Director Matt Baehr commented: “As we move forward, economic and labor trends, along with supply chain issues, will affect our industry greatly.”

PRINTING United Alliance announced that Dave Leskusky has been appointed president of PRINTING United Alliance. Leskusky has successfully overseen operations at NAPCO Media, which melded with the Alliance in 2019 to further connect members and the industry at large with a comprehensive platform of the most widespread media brands in the industry, more than 30 combined events, including the largest printing and graphic arts trade show in the Americas – PRINTING United. In this move, Leskusky will retain his role in leading NAPCO Media as part of the PRINTING United Alliance portfolio and will additionally support Alliance efforts to further streamline myriad robust resources and services being offered from the Alliance, including preeminent industry education, training, workshops, events, research, government and legislative representation, safety, and environmental sustainability guidance.