PRINTING ON DEMAND
ALTHOUGH SOME PUBLISHERS WERE SCEPTICAL AT FIRST, PRINTING ON DEMAND (POD) HAS NOW BECOME INDISPENSABLE IN THE PUBLISH WORLD.
TO PREPARE BOOKS THAT ARE NOT ‘DIGITAL-BORN’ FOR POD, FIRMS SUCH AS X-CAGO FIRST SCAN THEM. ‘IT’S FASCINATING TO NOTE THE PRECISION WITH WHICH SCANNING TAKES PLACE.’
Printing on demand – known in the trade as POD – is a relatively new technology. The English-language press has been writing about it since 1984, and the Dutch press since 1994.
‘There’s no future in bulk printing,’ said Gerard Slot, general manager of MultiCopy International in August 1994, to the Netherlands’ premier financial newspaper, Het Financieele Dagblad. The article continued: ‘Slot has noted a marked shift towards custom printing, a trend that will only increase in the years ahead. The new magic formula is “printing on demand”: small print runs of a few hundred to a few thousand copies that are produced according to the customer’s precise wishes.’
Less than six months later, in January 1995, NRC Handelsblad reported that ‘printing on demand is already being used for guides, manuals, reports, catalogues, and newsletters. …Even literary publishers are taking an interest. Peter van Gorsel, director of the literary branch of publishing company Meulenhoff, is especially charmed by the idea that small print runs can be made profitable this way. “If a book sells out, you might have 422 copies on order for three months that you could have sold. But offset is so expensive that you have to reprint at least 750 or 1000 copies to make it affordable. You then run the risk of dwindling demand, leaving you with an extra 500 copies and all the expense of storage, distribution, and depreciation, so that you end up underselling your product range. It’s the stress of having to print 1000 books in order to sell 100 copies.”’
500,000-GUILDER MACHINE
Photo: Royal Brill Cover of the first book published by Royal Brill, which was reprinted by POD as a test case. The test was carried out in 1994.The same 1994 article in NRC Handelsblad described another POD application. ‘Another possibility is printing small runs of older, out-of-print titles. Publishing house Brill has commissioned Rank Xerox to “reprint” Helena Augusta15: The Mother of Constantine the Great and the Legend of Her Finding of the True Cross, a monograph by Dr. J.W. Drijvers. The book was published two years ago and proved such a success that Brill has sold every copy. Rank Xerox has removed the spine, scanned the book page by page, saved the file digitally and produced a run of 250 copies on a DocuTech [a POD machine that cost more than 500,000 guilders at the time – ES]. It will be bound conventionally with an embossed paperboard cover, the same as the original. Brill is suspending judgment until it sees the final result, but it is questioning whether in this particular case, a DocuTech reprint is actually financially viable, given the loss of quality compared with photographic film and offset.’
The quality of POD has improved considerably in the past few decades. The technology has now become ubiquitous. In fact, many of us use it without being aware of it. For example, the photo albums that people order at department stores, book shops, and grocery stores are POD products.
All sorts of publishing houses, both literary and scientific, now use the technology as well. Peter van Gorsel, who is still active in publishing, summed up the advantages in 1994: because the print run can be matched to the demand, there’s no risk of overstock, thus avoiding the expense of storage and so on. Anyone who has a POD ready digital file can turn out a reprint at any time, even if the run consists of only a single copy.
DESTRUCTIVE SCANNING
The 1994 NRC Handelsblad article cited above refers to disassembling a book published by Brill. In trade jargon, that is known as destructive scanning. After removing the spine, the loose pages are cut out and fed into an automatic document feeder. Like a copier, the scanner then pulls the pages through the device.
Destructive scanning is still common. Many people are uncomfortable with the idea of books being destroyed in the process, but if there are enough copies of the book extant, then no harm is done. An added advantage is that the pages remain perfectly flat during the scanning process.
GUTTER SHADOW
Back in 1994, publishing house Brill was still questioning the usefulness of POD. By now, that usefulness has become clear. In fact, today virtually all of Brill’s books and journals – between 600 and 700 titles a year – are POD products.
X-CAGO employee scanning a historical magazine. The magazine is held in a book cradle. The standard setting for a scan is 300 dpi, in colour. The biggest fi es (approximately 90 Mb per image) are stored in tiff format, preventing any loss of quality. Employees wear special gloves during the scanning process. Opinions differ about the need to use gloves. The National Library of the Netherlands prohibits the use of gloves, whereas other parties require it.Needless to say, new publications are ‘digital-born’, as it is called in the trade – i.e. delivered in digital format by the author or publisher. But none of the books in Brill’s out-of-print catalogue have been digitised, and that is a considerable number. Brill has published more than 12,000 titles since the 1950s. As is often the case for specialist scientific publishers, it sometimes receives an order for a book that was published decades ago.
That is why Brill is digitising a select number of titles from its out of- print catalogue. These books are sent to X-CAGO in Roermond.
For anyone who regularly scans books themselves, it’s fascinating to note the precision with which scanning takes place there. To prepare a book for POD, it is first scanned in colour at 600 dpi (see the box ‘Dpi’). That can be difficult in the case of a thick book because when you place it underneath the scanner’s glass plate, there is a shadow in the gutter (the middle, along the spine of the book). In such cases, the books are therefore scanned twice, first only the left-hand pages, and then only the right-hand pages. The software then arranges all the pages in the correct order.
Often extremely valuable, the books are scanned with the utmost care.
DAMAGED BOOKS
‘Unfortunately, many old books come to us in less than perfect condition. Because we deal with this on a weekly basis, we’ve become familiar with the terminology,’ says an X-CAGO employee. ‘A distinction is made between damaged paper, damaged binding and structural damage. We often see that the hinge connected to the back cover has come loose, leading to splits in the text block. Sometimes the spine has come completely loose from the text block. The inner hinges may also be torn. All these things make books, but also newspapers and magazines, very fragile. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, a paper was often made out of rags – usually cast-away clothing. Contrary to what many people think, this was extraordinarily sturdy paper, and much less damage-prone than paper made of wood chippings.’
DPI
Dpi stands for ‘dots per inch’ and was initially used only for ink-based print techniques. It indicated how many individual dots of ink could be placed in a line within the span of 1 inch (2.54 cm), for example, 300 dots per inch. The more dots, the sharper the image.
Today, dpi is also used to indicate digital image resolution – in other words, image sharpness that involves no ink whatsoever. Formally, this should actually be ‘pixels per inch’ (PPI or px/inch), but almost no one uses this abbreviation. As in printed images, the more dots (or pixels) that make up the image, the sharper it is.
The resolution at which an image is scanned depends on the original and the format in which the scan is to be produced. The lower limit is 300 dpi – nowadays usually in colour. Resolution can be as much as 6400 dpi and more, however. Scanning at such high resolutions takes patience because the scanning process is very slow. It also creates very large files that take up a lot of memory.
X-CAGO’s instructions for creating POD files break down into seven steps. After scanning a page at 600 dpi (in colour), the operator carefully cuts out the text, a technique known as cropping. Where necessary, the page is first straightened or de-skewed.
The second step – we will skip over a few steps in this description – involves converting colour into monochrome and removing the page’s grey background as well as any blots. The operator does this manually using a digital eraser. What remains after all this is a clean white page (inspection confirms this) with a digital copy of the original on it in crisp, sharp letters.
This step does not include any illustrations. They are scanned separately, either in colour or grey scale, depending on the original. They are then added one by one to the POD file, with the operator ensuring that the image is in precisely the right spot, for example with respect to a caption. This is referred to in the trade as a superimposed image.
The cover is also scanned separately, and OCR is used to read the text of the book.
All things considered, creating a POD file is a time-consuming process that requires precision work and a lot of patience. ‘I find it very calming,’ says an X-CAGO employee during a visit to the firm. ‘We get to see the most marvellous books, although we don’t really have time to read them. Sometimes they are damaged when we get them, and then it takes more time to create a decent POD file because we try to repair the damage digitally as best we can. When I work with damaged books, I realise just how much digitisation plays a role in book conservation. Once we’ve digitised a book properly, it can be stored safely away in our archive. Since we comply with digital sustainability standards, the POD file will also last a very long time.’
It should be noted that a paper print-out is not the only product that can be derived from a POD file. Publishing house Brill often only produces e-books from such files. For example, the Helena Augusta book mentioned earlier is available as an e-book.
16 All the books that Brill has had scanned are also available through its own digital platform. The platform includes many historical and antiquarian books whose texts have been converted to digital format using OCR.
With respect to POD, X-CAGO has worked closely with Schrijen-Lippertz (SL) printers, located in the southern Dutch town of Voerendaal, for many years. SL now has more than fifteen years of experience working with POD. In its view, POD represents added value because it makes it easy to select the desired content, layout the pages digitally and computerise the workflow. In the case of a book, it is obviously important to have the correct table of contents and appropriate layout and pagination. The present publication is a good example.
BRILL’S UNEXPECTED BESTSELLER
The publishing house now known as Royal Brill was founded by Jordaan Luchtmans (1652-1708) in 1683. He was born in Woudrichem, learned the book trade in The Hague, and registered as a member of the Leiden booksellers guild on 17 May 1683, now celebrated as the anniversary of Brill publishers.
Luchtmans specialised in books on linguistics and theology. He was closely associated with Leiden University, already a major center of study in biblical scholarship and Middle Eastern languages.
Luchtmans was a highly successful publisher, with 170 works in his catalogue between 1683 and 1708, among them 120 scholarly works.
Luchtmans publishing house was a family-run business until the early nineteenth century. In 1848, it was taken over by Evert Jan Brill (1848-1871), who had already worked for the house for many years. An advertisement in the 30 June 1848 Leydse Courant says: ’On s’abonne, à Leide chez E.J. BRILL, Successeur de la maison S & J. Luchtmans.’
Photo: Royal Brill Cover of the first edition of Sexual Life in Ancient China, an unexpected bestseller for publishing house Brill.
Source: www.dekrantvantoen.nl An image from the Leeuwarder Courant of November 1964.Royal Brill was and is an internationally renowned publishing house. It has published many pioneering studies in the fields of history, religious scholarship, and Jewish and Islamic studies (including the world-famous Encyclopaedia of Islam17). In 1961, its Sexual Life in Ancient China18 became an unexpected bestseller. The book was written by sinologist Robert van Gulik (1910-1967), who is better known among some readers as the author of the Judge Dee historical mystery novels.
For many years Brill had its own printing and antiquarian branches and offices in various countries. It sold its printing business in 1989. Shortly thereafter, its antiquarian branch became an independent entity and it closed down its foreign offices, except in the United States. Since 1991, Brill has concentrated on publishing specialist academic books and journals. Printing on demand plays an increasingly important role in its operations.
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