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Konica Minolta’s unrivalled AccurioPress line of hardware lets you tap into self-publishing markets that would once have been unprofitable – or simply not existed at all.
Book publishing used to be a complicated business. As we all know, however, the times – and technologies – are a’ changing. Whereas publishing used to be an offset printing domain, on-demand publishing is now a high-growth sector, letting budding authors everywhere produce books, calendars, magazines or photo albums on demand, even in tiny print runs.
As such, it has become a potentially huge business opportunity for digital print shops. Flexible print providers can benefit from this trend by producing a range of bound documents including books, calendars, magazines, and photo albums. InfoTrends expects the book-printing market to grow by 16.7% over their seven-year forecast period, meaning print volume from book publishing will come to almost 54 billion pages by 2016. In other words, on-demand book publishing is a new business field that’s well worth looking into!
On-demand publishing enables authors to self-publish books, or even "sell first, then print". The big advantage of on-demand publishing is that it makes even tiny print runs of just one copy possible and profitable – and shortens a book's time to market. On-demand publishing could prove a lucrative source of new revenue for your business.
But how are you going to squeeze the maximum benefit out of this market? Konica Minolta’s unrivalled AccurioPress line of printing hardware, which incorporates both AccurioPress and bizhub Press product series, offers a wide range of benefits that will let you do just that. AccurioPress systems are perfect for expanding digital printing environments, with professional modular finishing, outstanding colour and registration stability combined with excellent print quality. The AccurioPress systems give print providers the opportunity to handle a wider range of essential digital printing services and printing applications, including colour print products such as business cards, flyers, brochures, banners, envelope printing and many more.
Having previously outsourced book cover production, with the AccurioJet KM-1 the whole process can be managed in-house which enables Totem.com.pl to offer a real print on demand service, the company benefits from offset-like quality production and lower costs as well as the ability to print on standard offset media as well as cardboard, metallic grades and Plastics.
We’ve all got at least one book in us, they say – and for you as a printer, that’s potentially very good news. On-demand publishing is another high-growth sector that’s been created out of nothing by new technology in the past two decades. Your customers will want you to offer on-demand publishing because it makes self-publishing in small print runs possible and feasible, shortens the time it takes for the book to reach the market, lowers the cost of publishing and does away with the cost of storing printed books.
Want the ultimate in digital print production performance? You just found it. Konica Minolta’s Production Printing and Office hardware are industry benchmarks, with devices offering revolutionary colour image quality, ultra-high-speed black-and-white output, pro-quality inline finishing options to meet your complex job specifications, and more. Regardless of the size or area of specialisation of your company, our print hardware lets you build up your printing infrastructure, manage digital content, put in place state-of-the-art measuring instruments, and explore other solutions designed to change your workflow beyond recognition.
Explore the countless different ways in which Konica Minolta software products could improve your operations. Konica Minolta solves the problems of your company, matches different working styles, and offers software solutions meeting the needs of your industry. By prioritising your needs at all times, Konica Minolta meets the software requirements of even the most demanding global organisations. Using the system, you can keep a lid on the cost of any printed or copied output, create advanced security measures to ensure sensitive documents don’t fall into unauthorised hands, and more.
Our experienced, knowledgeable specialist staff will answer any questions you may have, and show you how to operate your product. Our services function for your benefit, within a support system designed to ensure you and your company benefit fully from the solutions. We offer a range of different services, including optimised print services to combine your consulting; hardware and software implementation; workflow management to lower your document spending; and smart security services, to keep your business safe.
On-demand publishing offers a wide range of benefits. By broadening your ability to print books, calendars, magazines, photo albums and more, it creates a potentially vast new source of revenue, while also allowing more intensive use of existing printing capabilities, such as inline finishing functions.
So if you want to boost your sales revenues, broaden your portfolio and gain a foothold in a fast-growing new market, you need to be moving into on-demand publishing and installing customized hardware from the AccurioPress line of hardware.
With on-demand publishing, you will enjoy the following benefits:
Short learning curve
Lets authors self-publish
Extends your range of print products and print services
Creates ready-made print products, including book binding and folding, with no need for extra manual steps
Lets you offers calendars, books and other media
Makes small book print runs profitable
Minimises print preparation costs
Introduces a highly efficient production process
Saves materials, time and money
Prokom is the Konica Minolta User Community where you can find market research, information and practical tools, which will help you become better informed, more productive and ultimately more profitable. At Prokom we believe it’s not just about what you make, it’s about what you make possible
Four steps to build your business:
Why does it make sound business sense to look into a specific opportunity for growing your business? We offer a number of White Papers dealing with a wide range of topics, such as Web to Print, Variable Data Printing, Workflow Automation, Inline Finishing and Book Publishing.
How does this business opportunity fit into my existing operational setup? Our Assessment Guides, written by independent industry experts, will help you to assess in practical terms if your business is ready for a particular new business opportunity, for example Web to Print.
Want to ensure successful implementation while avoiding pitfalls which can lead to disappointments? A step-by-step Implementation Guide written by an independent industry specialist will enable you to put the new business opportunity into practice in your company. Because implementing a new business opportunity can be a complex business, of course, we also offer you practical support throughout the implementation stage.
How have other print providers profited from a particular new business opportunity? Read how other customers similar to yourself have benefited in case studies from the different business opportunities fields. Then you can judge for yourself if the investment is worthwhile.
Based in Iasi, northern Romania, PIM is a leading digital print provider which also operates from three other locations in the region. Founded by Marius Petrariu in 1992, the company started life as a general commercial printer, but now specialises in on-demand book printing. Without this specialisation, the future of PIM would not have been as bright as it is today – and here’s why.
In the early noughties, after watching his business grow for almost two decades, Marius Petrariu realised PIM was struggling financially. New revenue streams were needed to turn things around; he had some experience in offering digital printing services, and saw this could be where that growth was achieved.
In 2009, Petrariu started looking into the business opportunities involved in producing smaller quantities of books. He recognised that lower run-length jobs would only make losses for bigger publishing houses using traditional offset printing technologies, and that if he was able to streamline the production process and use digital printing technologies to publish on-demand (within 24 hours), it would yield a healthy new source of revenue.
The key was that the production process should require as few manual touch points as possible, making a full range of inline finishing critically important. After weighing up all the solutions available on the market, he decided to install several Konica Minolta presses and workflow solutions. At the same time as doing this, Marius Petrariu had contacted a number of other publishing houses, convincing them to outsource their smaller-quantity jobs to him – work which would usually only make a loss for these larger, more traditional publishing houses.
These new ideas began to prove themselves within months. “It was clear to me that the average quantity of books per order was declining steadily,” Petrariu explains. “This gave me the opportunity to produce all the book titles quickly, and relatively inexpensively. And it worked! It did generate the new revenue stream we needed.” He goes on: “Today, we produce more than 100 new book titles per month. The average quantity is about 100 copies per title, but sometimes we run over 1,000 copies, and sometimes we have a print run of just one copy. Our customers ask us to produce a wide variety of books, ranging from academic text books to art catalogues.”
The future now looks bright for PIM: “Because of our ability to deliver high-quality publications consistently within 24 hours, we have built a strong reputation nationwide. Some 40% of our orders now come from our capital, Bucharest, far outside our traditional ‘home market’. Because of this, we are now in the process of opening a digital production centre in Bucharest, so we can serve this new key market better still.” Marius Petrariu concludes: “None of this would have been possible without the success we’ve had with our on-demand publishing business!”
Think on-demand publishing might be the right direction for your company? To chat about how our AccurioPress hardware solutions could be meeting your needs, contact one of our specialists.