While there is little doubt that the print media industry is changing, there is disagreement about what it’s changing into. In early February 2010, Jon Meacham, who edits the U.S. magazine Newsweek, spoke with Texas Monthly Talks, a television show broadcast on the station KLRU about the state of journalism as we enter the second decade of the 21st century. In 2010, Newsweek remade itself in response to decreasing subscriptions and ad revenue to devote more space to more in-depth features. The internet and the drop in price for commercial color printers are two juggernauts forcing changes in the print media industry.
Meacham’s assessment? “Change is not a bad thing. But it would be terrific if we knew what we were changing into.”
Not only are the magazines themselves changing, the technology used to produce them is changing as well. Digital presses are now the norm in commercial printing. The industry is changing to faster turnaround on smaller orders with more color. This is one of the best benefits of digital printing, better color than offset and other methods. The technology starts at the lower priced end with commercial color printers that use inkjet technology and goes up from there.
Gravure Printing
Magazines were traditionally produced on web offset printers, in 16-page sections using black and white, spot color, or full color. The pages were then bound by either stapling or gluing together into a cover to form a spine. Web offset presses are generally best for long run printing jobs of more than 10 to 20 thousand impressions. Some web offset presses also have the ability to cut, perforate, and fold the product. This is sometimes called roll gravure printing because the paper f ed into the printing machines comes off a giant roll.
A subset of gravure printing is sheet-fed gravure printing, which is used in Europe and places around the world. It is beginning to work its way into the North American market. The advantages of sheet-fed gravure printing include high quality, versatility, and economy of process. Sheet-fed gravure printing is known for its brilliance of color, optimum output, production of a minimum of waste, full-surface ink application, and various special effects.
But sheet-fed gravure printing isn’t the only game in town for specialized, small print-run magazine production. There are now inkjet commercial color printers for magazines using aqueous inks that are cured with UV light that create high quality pages. The UV curing process allows fast, high quality printing on a variety of media including poster paper, wallpaper, textiles, and coated and uncoated paper. And the colors make for excellent graphics. Wide-format inkjet commercial color printers print on paper that comes off rolls, so it can be used to print magazines via piezo drop on demand print heads.
Wide Format Printers
Following are some brief specs on some of the highest rated commercial color printers with inkjet technology, some of which work in wide format applications.
The Epson Stylus Pro 3800 Portrait Edition is one of the least expensive of Epson’s professional printers. Retailing for around $1,500, it features a 17 inch large format, and prints sizes A2 (16.5 x 23.4 inches), ANSI C (17 x 22 inches), at speeds of two minutes per page up to 11 minutes per page depending on format.
The HP DesignJet 3500cp is a 54 inch large format printer that uses rolls of 54 inches x 150 ft. It costs about $1,700 and prints at rates from 92.6 square meters per hour to 18.3 square meters per hour, usuable with PC or Mac.
The HP DesignJet 430E 36 inch large format printer is a monochrome inkjet commercial color printer that uses rolls of paper of 36 inches by 150 feet. Costing around $1,700, it prints 1.5 minutes per page and hooks up to PCs.
The HP DesignJet 130 is a 24 inch large format inkjet commercial color printer. It makes 24 x 36 inch posters, at anywhere from 4.3 minutes per page to 17.5 minutes per page, hooked up to a PC or a Mac via USB or parallel port. Its cost ranges from $1,000 to $1,600.
The HP DesignJet 90 is an 18 inch large format inkjet commercial color printer that can do sizes up to 18 x 24 inches at a rate of 1.7 minutes per page to 6.3 minutes per page. The DesignJet 90 costs just under $1,000.
The HP DesignJet 70 is another 18-inch large format inkjet commercial color printer that makes prints of up to 18 x 24 inches at anywhere from under a minute per page to 6 minutes per page. Like the HP DesignJet 90, the DesignJet 70 costs just under $1,000.
The HP DesignJet 820 MFP large format inkjet commercial color printer is a 42-inch printer that works off 42-inch wide rolls of paper. Costing $18,500 apiece, it prints from 21.5 square meters per hour to 85 square meters per hour using a PC or Mac.
The HP DesignJet 90 is an 18-inch inkjet commercial color printer that uses rolls of 18 inches x 500 feet. It costs $1,000 to $1,300 and prints from 4 to 6.3 minutes per page from a Mac or PC.
Cloud Printing
Cloud printing is a technology that is emerging for those who need to publish, but not often enough to justify the costs of a large format commercial color printer. One such program is called MagCloud. Printing on demand is growing as an industry, and MagCloud is an attempt by HP Labs to address online markets for creating custom and small niche magazines.
Small publishers can custom publish electronic copies of both current and back issues of their product using services like MagCloud. MagCloud provides automated magazine ordering, ad aggregation, and print management. Customers and potential customers discover a magazine they like through the MagCloud web portal and have it delivered while MagCloud manages the whole process for the publishers.
The niche most likely to use a service like MagCloud is a publisher of small print-run magazines who want to minimize their costs and increase ad revenue. It also has services for electronic magazines and for bloggers and webmasters who want to provide their readers with content in a glossy, printed magazine format. Users can browse through the MagCloud virtual magazine racks and order issues of their favorites, have them printed on demand and mailed to them.
It costs 20 cents per page and lets small magazine publishers who don’t need traditional web-offset printing services to create their own magazines. HP handles the particulars of customer orders, printing, and shipping. The publisher creates and uploads the magazine.
Some have taken issue with the designation of MagCloud as a “cloud” model, saying that HP stretches the concept even thinner than it already is. The reason for the complaints are that there is no actual computing done “in the cloud,” which means using unique software and distributing the computing load across a bunch of machines. It is, in fact, more analogous to CafePress.com for magazines.
A service like MagCloud could, some allege, be “hoised on its own petard,” so to speak, should the service take off. Here’s how. If it’s a one-to-one mapping of printing press-to-print-job, then it would have trouble dealing with economies of scale. Therefore, if MagCloud takes off, traditional printers would once again be necessary, demand would drive prices up, and once again printing would become too expensive for small-scale publishers.
But the service is still new enough that people are still playing with the virtual bubble wrap rather than testing it on a large scale, so who knows? For those who would like to try a service like MagCloud, here is how it is done.
First, the publisher creates a magazine using a design program. It can be Quark, or any other program that can create an 8.5 x 11 inch multi-page PDF file.
Next, the publisher uploads the PDF to the service, fills out some forms, and orders a proof. This is where the process goes “old school” for a bit. MagCloud prints up and binds a proof and mails it to the publisher. This process can take up to two weeks.
The publisher receives the hard copy proof and reviews it. If changes are needed, the publisher can upload a new PDF and order another proof. The publisher declares the issue to be “published” and sets the price of the publication. MagCloud charges 20 cents per page, and the publisher specifies any mark-up over and above that. So a 100 page magazine at 20 cents per page would cost $20 per copy to print. The publisher would then have to set the price over and above that to make a profit.
Once the issue is published, people go to the MagCloud website and order it using PayPal or a credit card. Currently, orders can be shipped to the US, Canada, and the UK, but there are plans to expand to other countries.
When an order is received, MagCloud prints it up, binds it, and mails it to the buyer or sends an order to a group using a capability called “ship to group.” Orders take up to two weeks to arrive, though MagCloud claims that the issues actually arrive much faster. The publishers get paid, and once a month, MagCloud pays royalties through PayPal.
With the magazine print industry changing so rapidly, it is hard to tell if the future is with print-on-demand services like MagCloud or if the use of high-end inkjet commercial color printers for magazines with small print runs will become the standard for small-batch magazine printing. If the cost of printer technology drops enough, its possible that the two technologies could come together in a marketplace of small-batch printers using high end commercial color printers plus binding equipment that could operate in bricks and mortar establishments or as web-based (but not n ecessarily “cloud”) services.
But if the cost of high-end large format inkjet commercial color printers drops enough, it’s possible that small organizations could afford their own printing equipment in the future and would simply need to outsource the binding service or purchase that equipment too.