“Electronic books may transform publishing industry” read the title on MarketWatch.com and the tag-line was, “Executives discuss impact of e-books at Frankfurt Books Fair.”

By Polya Lesova, MarketWatch

FRANKFURT (MarketWatch) — Electronic books may transform not only the publishing industry, but the very definition of what constitutes a book. E-books — whether read on an iPhone, a Kindle or a laptop — are a hot topic at this week’s Frankfurt Book Fair.

“Books are just devices. Wikipedia is the new Britannica,” said Ronald Schild, managing director of Germany-based MVB Marketing- und Verlagsservice des Buchhandels GmbH.

“Digital content is superior in many ways,” Schild said Thursday at a panel discussion on electronic books at the fair. “Reading today is solitary process, but there are many other ways of reading. [In the future,] it may become more of a conversation.”

While electronic books still account for only a small part of global publishing, their popularity is growing. Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN ) , which sells the electronic-book reader Kindle, is facing growing competition from other e-reader producers. In addition, many users are reading electronic content on their laptops, PCs and multi-functional mobile devices such as Apple Inc.’s (AAPL 189.91, -1.39, -0.72%) iPhone.  Read more... (692 words, estimated 2:46 mins reading time)

Dave Matthews heads up the prepress department at Progressive Printing, a Martinsburg, WV commercial printing facility. Long plagued by Microsoft Publisher files submitted by a typical (in the commercial art print poster world) customer base that’s ill-equipped and uneducated in the process of preparing digital content for print, Matthews discovered Markzware’s PUB2ID plug-in.  It should be noted that this plug-in also works for printable greeting card, printable business cards, printing posters, printable greeting cards, print postcard printing jobs, etc.
Markzware (the originators of FlightCheck) followed up with Matthews some months later to find out how the application had helped solve some of the conversion problems he’d been facing when dealing with Microsoft Publisher files regarding print art poster and art poster printing, and he was gracious to share his thoughts:

Markzware: When was the company founded?

Matthews: 1995.

Markzware: Is Progressive Printing’s clientele mostly local to the Martinsburg area? Or does your client base extend beyond the local market?

Matthews: About 60% of our clients are in the Martinsburg area. The other 40% is all over the US.  Read more... (787 words, estimated 3:09 mins reading time)

Your in-plant is slick. You’ve got the latest and greatest in print engines and a stealthy prepress workflow. But, what good is it when the front end of the process is replete with bad files — customer – supplied content that’s poorly prepared and requires time and expense to fix?

This is a problem many printing organizations — and in-plants, instant print shops, large-format print suppliers (for large digital printing) and general commercial printing companies — face today. Content coming into many printing plants just isn’t good.

So, why do we have this pervasive, industry-wide gap in the workflow, now, more than a decade after CTP and digital workflow invaded the print marketplace? Perhaps a look back on “digital evolution” will shed some light.

Printing organizations led their customers into digital workflows, starting with the early adoption of CTP and digital prepress technologies. Print providers made good and sure that they were ready and able to process digital files before they asked for them from their customers.  Read more... (934 words, estimated 3:44 mins reading time)

With the advent of digital workflow, new responsibilities emerge for the newspaper publisher and the ad creator

Ask most newspaper sales executives, and they’ll tell you just how competitive the market place is these days — how tough of a sell it is when other media forms are drawing the interest of advertisers like never before.

Newspapers must be able to compete with these other vehicles, present compelling circulation numbers, and provide excellent customer service to the advertising client. They must be able to accept, position, produce and print the advertiser’s copy and images, with particular attention paid to reproduction quality.

In the cases of ads supplied by larger agencies and experienced design firms, digital content may come in by way of “prepress-ready” file formats, all the elements present and accounted for, all the specifications for print met. But not all ads come in from clients well-equipped to supply these types of files. As a result, plenty of bad files come in the door — files rife with font, resolution or color space problems. And these “bad files” must then be fixed before they can be placed in the imposition, which, of course, takes time and money.  Read more... (1320 words, estimated 5:17 mins reading time)