A Publishing Evening with HP Indigo
The publishing industry converged to explore the power of possibilities, exchange ideas, and find sustainable solutions at a Publishing Evening with HP Indigo held in New Delhi recently.
The publishing industry has seen a fair share of hurdles in recent years. Early in the pandemic, the demand for print books rose sharply amid paper shortages and supply chain disruptions. These challenges prompted publishers to revamp their book printing and distribution strategies, benefiting print service providers with digital printing capabilities.
In this backdrop, HP, in association with All About Book Publishing as knowledge partner, organised a Publishing Evening, where publishers and printers gathered together to deliberate on the growth in the overall publishing ecosystem and challenges and opportunities they face together.
The event started with a brief welcome by Sanjiv Goswami, Managing Consultant, Tranzmedia Informatix, formerly Managing Director and Member of the board of Springer Nature and Macmillan, India. “The kind of transformation and change the publishing and the print industry has undergone, from sourcing content, editing, curation, processing, publishing, and dissemination, has been phenomenal. Let us embark on this journey of collaboration, being sustainable and exchange ideas of being profitable in this changing time,” he said.
While, Abhishek Bhatnagar, Segment Marketing Lead- Commercial, Greater Asia & India, HP India, shared, “The digital printing industry is going to revolutionize the entire printing industry of India through the digital printing process. We are trying our best to help you out that how we can contribute to the publishing industry.”
Keynote address…
The Keynote Speaker was Dr. Lalit Singh, Managing Director – McGraw Hill, India, who shared his views on the “Changing Landscape of the Indian Book Industry- the role of Publishers & Printers.”
“I strongly believe that technology is the means and not the outcome. Technology has to be intelligent and not indulgent. But besides technology, what is also really forcing us to think is the regulations and the consumer behaviour. Besides, the New Education Policy is shaping new trends, though it is more like a vision document at this stage and various stages of implementation across various stages of education. But what we clearly see as trends already shaping up are the need for more integrated learning content. I think it’s a good opportunity for the industry as the number of learners is increasing. With technology, you can make the content individualized, which is not possible in a traditional book model, especially the print book model,” he said.
Panel discussion….
The panel discussion on Envisioning the World of Books in the Future and India’s role was moderated by Emma House, International Publishing Consultant. The panellists included Ajay Mago, Publisher, Om Books International; Neeraj Jain, Managing Director, Scholastic India; Nitasha Devasar, Managing Director and Commercial Lead, India, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, Taylor & Francis Group and Ashok Pahwa,Business Manager- HP.
On sustainability…
Emma started the discussion by talking about sustainability, which is a topic that’s the focus of many conferences around the world at the moment. “And with the pressure that’s on for the whole world to reach net zero carbon emissions, the publishing industry needs to play its role as well,” she said.
Nitasha shared that being an international publisher, sustainability is a part of their business requirement. “Since T&F publishes research-based publications, we have stayed with the POD model actually from day one. Our printers source paper from sustainable renewable sources and use environment-friendly inks. More recently, we shifted from bubble wrap packaging to honeycomb packaging. We also use recycled paper for packaging,” she shared.
While, Neeraj shared, “At Scholastic, we deal with a lot of four-colour content, so it becomes a bit challenging to move towards print-on-demand as it is quite expensive. But, we have a good balance between print-on-demand and offset printing, depending on the number of copies we need for a particular book. We are actively working towards reducing our inventory as the more it sits in the warehouse, the more damage we’re going to get.”
Ajay also reverberated similar thoughts, “In our kind of nature of books, it’s pretty much hard in terms of moving to digital due to high costs. But, I would like to move to digital printing because we need to go with the sustainable model. We have an emission calculator that we have developed for each book which is getting printed on a particular system.“
While, Ashok shared, “Globally, publishers are aiming at 100% recyclable green books, published on 100% recyclable paper printed on a sustainable machine. This is possible through digital printing. Some people call it a gap printing strategy but digital printing can get publishers close to their readers fast, saving on logistics and supply chain. Publishers can print near to his customer. HP offers solutions for colour digital printing on different media. What’s more? The quality of each book printing on these machines remains the same.”
On digital printing…
Talking about POD, Neeraj shared, “During the pandemic, we also launched a new program, which was Writers Academy, where we identified students who are talented in writing, gave them a short term course on writing and then they ended up writing a story, which we published in the anthology. The initial plan was to do it digitally but we realised they wanted a hard copy of it. That’s where print-on-demand became very handy. Since then, it has become a very good model for us. We published close to 2,000 students through that model and more than 100 adults.”
Talking about the pandemic, Nitasha shared, “One of the things that impacted us all in different ways, but certainly for us, was a shift from print to e. The other thing which we actually have had, which is a permanent shift now, is pre-pandemic, 80% of our POD in US was coming from India and 20% was local. And now it’s flipped to exactly the opposite. Basically, it is the combination of two things: one is obviously that you’re eliminating the shipping and secondly, the quality is good.”
While Ajay shared, “My first choice for printing is definitely India as India is not too far from China in terms of pricing. Printing is going to increase in India. The future is bright for printers and publishers.”
To which, Ashok added, “In the last one year is that a lot of manufacturing has moved out of China and started in Vietnam first, which is now moving to India. So, there will be a demand for printing as well and publishing industries will be benefited out of that investment too.”
There was an interesting Q&A session at the end of the panel discussion.
HP presentation…
“Books are growing almost at 10.7 CAGR from 2019 to 2027 on a digital only format,” shared Ashok, who dwelt on the various advantages of printing on demand. “There will be no MOQs (minimum order quantities) with digital printing. Moreover, there will be supply chain efficiencies by printing at different centers close to the customers. And then print what you want, when you want and where you want.”
While, A Appadurai, Country Manager – Indigo & Inkjet Solutions Hewlett-Packard India Sales Pvt Ltd gave the closing remarks. He shared, “Every publishing company must be having at least 90% of the titles in the back list. This back list can be alive through digital printing. Also, only 1% of manuscripts get published, But, with digital printing we can print more authors and more manuscripts. Besides, we need to be more responsive. India is a country which is full of all festivals and so many different cultures into it.Have we ever experienced or exploited our cultural attention to our festivals for selling our book to them? This can be done through digital packaging. Customization, personalization, limited edition — all this is possible through digital printing!”
The event was attended by over 80 publishers and printers.
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