Colour Printer Develops Print On Demand Publishing

National Hirschfeld is installing an Infoprint 5000 from Infoprint Solutions to help it progress the development of its publishing and print-on-demand (POD) services.

The Denver, Colorado (USA) company chose the full-colour, continuous forms, inkjet drop-on-demand printer to produce customised textbooks for education.

National Hirschfeld also offers colour and personalised POD to customers in other growth sectors, such as direct marketing and catalogue printing.

The company has nine competencies, from offset through direct marketing to POD, web printing and collateral.

The company uses three conventional web offset presses and five large sheetfed presses to work with customers across several vertical sectors, featuring books, financial services, insurance and direct marketing.

The Infoprint 5000's claimed high speed, quality of output and ease-of-use allows National Hirschfeld to solve many of the issues for educational publishers, where cost, quality and volume have limited the widespread adoption of printing customised full-colour textbooks, on demand.

Previously, conventional printing was limited to versioning within long print runs.

That, coupled with the high cost of warehousing inventory made dynamic publishing uneconomical, said National Hirschfeld.

The Infoprint technology is also claimed to solve the problem of textbook obsolescence by keeping them current, meaning publishers can minimise the used book market, whilst increasing revenues.

The Infoprint 5000 incorporates page-level error recovery, data integrity, auditability and control, said Infoprint Solutions.

The printer also enables flexible page composition using AFP and Intelligent Print Data Stream (IPDS), which are said to allow users to manage short print runs of complex books easily and quickly.

National Hirschfeld's customers can now order precise runs of customised colour books, printed as required, produced quickly with quality but without the costs traditionally associated with such services, said the company.

That means specific information for niche audiences, such as students, can be produced quickly and easily in small quantities.

Infoprint said it will work with National Hirschfeld on co-branded collateral, business development and systems support for customers.

Rob Malkin, the chief operating officer at National Hirschfeld, commented: "Personalisation is driving change throughout the printing world and is now reaching the print-on-demand sector.

Add high quality, low cost colour to this recipe and eventually we will see a world where professors customise books on a page-by-page level, with the potential of printing billions of different pages.

Teaming with Infoprint Solutions, we are leading this seismic shift in the industry and moving to a truly customised services environment." Chris Reid, director of global solutions at Infoprint Solutions, said: "Personalised publishing is the next big thing in production print.

We will see individual versions of much of the hard copy printed content on the market today, from newspapers, car manuals and travel guides to the high end textbooks that National Hirschfeld will start to produce on the Infoprint 5000.

The inclusion of one-on-one messaging gives audiences with the exact information they need, which will drive demand in this sector." Infoprint Solutions said that National Hirschfeld will benefit from the pritner manufacturer's expertise in the open, industry-standard AFP Colour Management Architecture (ACMA).

Infoprint added that it was one of the chief architects of AFP, which is now endorsed by the printing industry to provide accurate, consistent and device-independent colour rendering.

National Hirschfeld is over 100 years old and was formed from a consolidation of three regional printers - C and M Press, National Printing and Packaging and A B Hirschfeld Press.

The printer has been producing monochrome textbooks for some time and the installation of the Infoprint 5000 marks a shift to what is claimed to be a true inkjet, drop-on-demand environment meeting educational publishers' demands for colour, speed and quality.

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