With all the talk about print on demand, digital printing and the future of the publishing industry, it's easy to forget that we have production books here and now, and we need to know the best way to produce these books today, this week. Okay, we only have 5 minutes, so let's dive in.
Three ways to print books
There are three different technologies for printing books that are widely used. Let them quickly let them go and see how they all play.
- Letterpress - It was the main printing method from Gutenberg until the mid-twentieth century. Anyway, typographical, pictorial engravings or engraved metal plates made of photographic originals are tinted, and then the paper is turned over them, transferring the image to paper, one sheet at a time. Letterpress technology led to large automatic presses. You can see how versatile this printing method is, because it has eclipsed all other forms of printing for over 400 years. Letterpress is still used today for very thin limited-edition books and in areas of the world where electricity is unreliable. A letter that works on a foot pedal can work for many years only with the help of lubricant and does not need power at all.
- offset - The development of offset printing at the beginning of the twentieth century was caused by the accidental discovery that the image transferred onto paper with a rubber coated cylinder was actually more sharp than the image of the original type. This bias increase wave image to offset name printing. With the advent of industrial photography and advances in paper and plastic materials, photolithography, platemaking using a photographic process, offset printing for overtaking is allowed. AT offset printing , the paper is fed to the press and printed one sheet at a time. AT web offset , special presets are used to print from a large roll of paper, which, when it moves through the press, forms Web for which it is named. At the end of the press, the paper is cut into individual sheets. Equipment for bending, trimming, and assembling a print job is often set up right at the end of a press, which allows a printer to complete a print project in a single pass from empty paper to finished, collected work.
- Digital - Digital printing, the result of getting married on a computer high-speed copy machine on computer binding equipment, is the fastest growing form of book printing today. Computer servers store separate, but coordinated, digital files for the cover of the book and the internal text block. At the request of the operator or computer instruction files are uploaded to the press on the press and displayed with toner in the same way as copies of images of high end copies. The resulting pages are combined with a cover with a color image. The whole book is glued and trimmed. Some digital printing devices can produce a whole book, color cover and everything, in just seven minutes. The main difference between printing with printing and offset printing, on the one hand, and digital, on the other hand, is that digital printing is designed to create one copy of a book at a time. Other, earlier printing methods produce books in stages and work efficiently only while creating multiple copies.
Well, now we know about the three methods of printing, but how does this help choose the right one? Here is the best way to use each printing method:
- Letterpress printing is used almost exclusively for thin books with limited circulation. The characteristic “bite” of the type in the paper, and the resulting fine texture, which it adds to the page, is impossible in other ways. These books are usually made of generous materials and can cost hundreds of dollars each.
- offset printing is used for most books released today. Web page offset is used to create mass market in paperbacks, for example, in stores in supermarkets and airports, as well as for very large editions of other books. Sheet-fed offset book printing offers the best quality of art and photography reproduction, and is most flexible when it comes to the number of sizes offered for books and various types of paper available for printing.
- digital printing is increasingly used in the print on demand distribution model, which is becoming so popular. Major publishers move their books back to digital printing, saving money on warehousing and shipping. The phenomenon of self-publishing generated a huge demand for digital printing through print distribution on demand, since it eliminated almost all the costs of publishing a book.
In brief: use high-resolution printing for very thin books with limited editions. Use web offset for the mass market and books with very high volume, which do not have to be of high quality. Use offset printing to print more than 500 copies or where high-quality reproductions are required. Use digital printing where short runs are very short or you don’t need the inventory of books.
