Monthly Archives: March 2009

Fast forward to the past with DVDs on demand

By , Tuesday, 24 March 2009, 1 Comment

How’s this for a concept: Out-of-print music? It’s not sheet music, and it’s not synaesthesia either.

It is Amazon subsidiary CreateSpace’s description of its Back from the Vault scheme to offer hard to find music recordings. Where’s the print angle? Well, you can choose to buy the music either as an MP3 download, or for those that prefer as a CD including printed artwork.

CreateSpace is open to new authors, musicians and filmmakers too, all with the option of physical distribution on paper, CD or DVD as well as various digital download only options.

CreateSpace and Amazon are not alone in using print-on-demand to connect customers to both new and old content. According to Variety Warner Brothers has launched a website WarnerArchive to make available 5,000 titles that previously weren’t available on DVD. The US-only site will ship a made-to order DVD in shrink-wrapped case with cover art to customers within five days.

Here’s a bit of cheer for all of us involved in the world of physical media – yup that’s print. Tech website geek.com had the following to say on WarnerArchive.

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Simpler colour is a cause for cheer

By , Wednesday, 18 March 2009, 1 Comment

Colour is moving from a black art to a lights out operation.

In the last few months there have been significant moves towards the standardisation and automation of colour throughout the workflow from proofing to press-side.
The uptake of such technology will make print as a medium, simple to use, cost competitive and ensure high quality.

EFI and has announced a new version of its Colorproof XF package that takes advantage of the built-in spectrophotometer in the latest Epson printers, while other vendors will support it in about to be released software.

Other wide-format printers have a measuring device built-in, but this is the first one to have an X-Rite i1 under the hood, and be clever enough to use it to calibrate and verify itself without any user intervention. Roll-on reliable remote proofing without anyone at the receive site needing a degree in colour science and a free hour or two to massage the machinery. Simplified hard copy proofing may delay the drive to soft proofs for a short while.

It may even, where colour is critical, keep toner-based proofs in check, as the architecture of a toner-based machine doesn’t make it possible to stamp the proof so simply.

That said, as light production colour machines get a whole lot better and the demand for stable colour rises, the inline spectrophotometers that are making their way onto production colour digital presses may well find their way inside far more humble printers before too long.

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Print is ahead of the carbon curve

By , Tuesday, 10 March 2009, 4 Comments

A big cheer for the BPIF for finally getting its carbon footprint calculator off the ground. In these dismal days, it’s nice to have a bit of good news. Although this isn’t about green shoots, it is at least a green issue.

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Missing a trick by not marketing print as a marketing medium

By , Monday, 2 March 2009, 3 Comments

As the media landscape changes and savvy printers choose to redefine themselves as marketing service providers I thought it was worth a visit to the Technology for Marketing & Advertising show held at Earls Court 2 last week

Print wasn’t much in evidence. The only firm making a pitch for print was Infoprint Solutions promoting the power of transpromo, an application that is meat and drink for its Infoprint 5000 inkjet press.

The firm said it was mobbed by marketers keen to know more who hadn’t heard that bills & statements provided a medium for them to use for their message before. Once they had they were keen to find out more.

More typical was the attitude of one exhibitor who couldn’t grasp why anyone involved in print might be at the show. He could talk about inbound and outbound marketing, and divide outbound into online and offline, but couldn’t see print’s place within that mix. He conceded outbound offline meant direct mail, which involved print, but then added that was all switching to online anyway.

It strikes me that print is missing a trick marketing itself as a marketing medium. It needs to fight against many media to prove it has a place in the mix.

It’s reassuring that marketers are interested what print can do but depressing that so few from our industry chose to go and show what they can do.

Print is a technology for marketing. Let us get on with marketing the technology.

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