Book Man: King of a Changing Bookmaking Paradigm

E-book volumes are static. There is a surge in demand for printed books. Readers have discovered that you can give books as gifts, lend books to friends, sell them to others, or actually read a printed book years after acquisition without any device or software. And books always look good on a shelf.

The growth of printed books is based on two trends. The first is self-publishing. I went to an authors’ event recently and walked the aisles filled with tables of self-published books in all shapes and sizes. Self-publishing has been engendered by the second trend: on-demand printing (ODP). The concept of ODP has been around since the 1980s when Kodak and Xerox had toner-based printers that could print and bind in the same machine.

When I wrote my first book in 1971, I asked the printer for 500 copies. The printer said that their minimum run was 5,000. “You can throw away 4,500 of them,” he said. In 1988, I consulted for the University of Vermont to set up an on-demand book facility. They linked to the Copyright Clearance Center so that content could be selected and then used in course materials sold in the campus bookstore. By 1992, the concept was catching on and by 1993, Indigo and Xeikon printed in full color.

It took a while for on-demand printing to gain traction. There were quality and workflow issues that had to evolve. Those issues did evolve and improved and today printing on demand, which is a euphemism for digital printing, is growing in use by publishers worldwide.

I contend that of the 700 million books produced in the U.S. last year, about half were printed on demand using digital technology. No one really tracks this area very well. There are still very long print runs of “best sellers” that require big web offset presses, but the changes in the book world are being wrought by digital technologies for shorter and even medium runs.

This brings me to King Printing Company of Lowell, Mass. Founded in 1978 as a copy shop by Sid Chinai and his wife Amita, it ran with Sid selling by day and running the press and finishing systems by night working alongside his wife. Today, both of them still work in the organization that has been run by their son Adi Chinai since 2003. Adi graduated from Bentley College with a degree in finance and never intended to run the printing business. But sometimes an individual with a different point of view brings a new perspective to a business. 

I would often run into Sid and Adi at trade shows around the world. They are always looking for the next “gizmo” that will give King a production advantage.

During the 1980s, King looked for a better way of handling short-run printing, and in 1988 they installed their first digital press, a glorified copier. They soon had multiple printing systems in operation. These were the days before the Xerox Docutech. The short-run printing business took off and King Printing concentrated on it, eventually transitioning into one of the first installations of a series of Docutech presses. They switched to Heidelberg (later Kodak) Digimaster sheetfed monochrome digital presses. These were the black and white days and high-tech manuals were the big on-demand printed product.

In 1994 the company moved into CTP to feed its offset presses by installing a Creo platesetter that imaged Kodak thermal plates. King still uses offset and CTP, but volume is diminishing. 

King installed the Screen Truepress Jet 1990. This was one of the first rollfed color inkjet printing systems. An inline Hunkeler finishing system was also linked into the press via a turner system. The workload on this press rapidly built up with both monochrome and color work. Today, the output of the plant is mostly color and overwhelmingly digital with several different digital systems that are all linked in a cohesive workflow.

The move to inkjet was important. King was able to establish a niche as a cost-effective short run book printer. Today, digital printing is on a par with offset, and most full-color books are digitally printed. 

More high-speed digital inkjet presses were moved into the King facility. King’s production plant looks like a mini trade exhibition, with many different printing systems and loads of specialty binding equipment. To list all of the equipment would take up most of this article. This mix of systems allows them to produce almost any book in any format. But the key is automation. It is said that “Printing Industry 4.0” is all about automation. For King, automation is a mantra.

Their workflow is proprietary and goes beyond JDF. They have their own proprietary approach. It is for this reason that a crew of just over 100 can produce millions (I said “millions”) of books a year. 

When Howie Fenton and I wrote the first book on on-demand publishing, it was printed on a Docutech. At one point, customers were told that the book was out of stock. This was weird because the book was produced on-demand. GATF had run out of the Channel Bind covers, which were produced by an outside supplier. If you are going to make a book, the finishing is as important as the book block.

That is what King gets right. They can give you any kind of binding you specify: hard and softcover, saddlestitch, spiral wire and plastic binding. And every one of these methods is growing. In addition, they produce beautifully-printed book jackets. The King sample room has examples of the many books that they have printed. It looks like the award winners at a book show. 

But King hasn’t just made printing and binding more efficient. They have changed they way publishers operate. At one time, it was all about inventory. Print and bind the books and ship them to a warehouse; then ship them to a booksellers’ warehouse or even multiple warehouses. Today, it is all about Virtual Inventory Management. We live in a “Just In Time” world and that is where King excels. 

Publishers print what they need when they need it. As a result, King’s market has expanded from the New England region to the rest of the U.S. as well as Europe and Asia. King has kept a reasonable mix of big and small customers and has brought them into the new age of publishing. 

Tom Campbell is the company’s Vice President of Publishing Sales. He has been with King for more than 20 years. As he travels to customer and potential customer sites, he has become an apostle of the new paradigm for book publishing. He loves to talk about the life cycle of the printed book and how King can help publishers implement new supply chain models.

I love to visit innovative printers who not only think out of the box, they invent the box. King Printing has succeeded by integrating industry available technology with proprietary workflow. They have built a great service business that has gone on to change the publishing business.

Frank Romano has published 62 books. He is RIT Professor Emeritus and President of the Museum of Printing in Haverhill, Mass. His library has 7,000 books in it.