Landa Plans Expansion with New Ink Plant in North America (piworld.com)

Sheridan has acquired PubFactory, the industry-lauded online publishing platform for journals, books, and reference works, from O’Reilly Media. PubFactory will continue to be based out of Boston, MA, and will blend seamlessly into the Sheridan stable of publisher technology products and services. The PubFactory team has been developing and delivering scholarly publishing technologies since 1999. In 2010, the PubFactory platform officially launched with the deployment of several major Oxford University Press products. This was quickly followed by the International Monetary Fund’s eLibrary and De Gruyter’s journals, books, and database products launching in 2011. Notable publishers including Bloomsbury Publishing, Brill, Edward Elgar Publishing, Harvard University Press, Peter Lang, and others have since joined the growing list of PubFactory customers. PubFactory’s configurable suite of front-end and back-end capabilities allows for optimal support across content types, making it a truly content agnostic platform that is host to 1400+ journals, 400,000+ books, and numerous database and reference work products. Click Read More below for additional detail.

The commercial printing industry will grow in 2021. Growth will begin during the second quarter, and accelerate through year end. No company, however, should count on the upturn or the shakeout of weak competitors to make everything right. Much will be different in the post-COVID world. And much of the gains ahead will be reserved for companies already thinking about those differences, and how to make them opportunities rather than threats. Those conclusions are based on the COVID-19 Print Business Indicators Survey, conducted every other month by PRINTING United Alliance and NAPCO Research. Nearly 200 commercial printers participate. The diverse group has annual sales ranging from less than $1 million to more than $700 million, and is located across the U.S. and Canada. We measure percent change in sales in two ways. Year-over-year is the first to capture the depth and breadth of the downturn. Among all companies surveyed, sales fell 16.9%, on average, during the first three quarters of 2020 compared with year earlier levels, declining for 81.9% — by at least 20% for more than half and at least 30% for nearly one-third — and increasing for just 17%. One participant speaks for many when he describes what’s happened this year as a “seismic downturn.”

Taylor Corp. acquired its first production inkjet press in 2009, and it has been a proponent of the technology ever since. But, given that the company — ranked sixth on the 2019 Printing Impressions 400 list of the industry’s leading print service providers — consists of 80 subsidiaries operating in 25 states and nine countries, any technology naturally would need time to make its influence felt throughout an organization of such vast size. Inkjet technology gained a higher profile within the Taylor family when a business unit of one of its companies recently became the first printing site in the world to install an AccurioJet KM-1e sheetfed color production inkjet press from Konica Minolta. The press, an enhanced version of Konica Minolta’s successful AccurioJet KM-1 platform, is expected to broaden the range of what the business unit and its parent company can produce, achieving new levels of quality and cost efficiency for both. The B2+ format, LED-UV AccurioJet KM-1e went into full operation at FolderWorks, a division of Navitor, at Navitor’s North Mankato, Minn., headquarters in March.