Print on Demand with BookPrep and MagCloud
If someone will say that printer manufacturers are in a quandary nowadays, we would not be too surprised. After all, how indeed are you going to stay profitable while at the same time supporting environmental and financial concerns, both of society in general and your individual consumers? One will certainly need to be creative and innovative in order to retain an upper hand in the playing field. And it looks like HP is trying to be ahead of everyone else.
HP is reportedly announcing two new projects at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco this week. Both seem to be strategic towards maintaining HP presence if and when we do move into a more paper-less society, or at the very least reach a point in time when the current process of putting things out in print will experience a shift from highly speculative to on-demand printing.
The two projects, called BookPrep and MagCloud, both seem to be great concepts. Not only are both initiatives environmentally friendly, it looks like they may also help publishers achieve higher profitability by doing away with speculative printing and the unnecessary overhead costs that go with it.
The way things are currently done now in as far as printed books and magazines are concerned is that a publisher will speculate on the number of copies of each book title or magazine that will be printed. These are then distributed for selling, and, fingers crossed, one can only hope that they sell enough to turn a profit. Anything that is left behind, especially in the case of magazines, will end up in a landfill somewhere.
BookPrep and MagCloud will hopefully address that. Both work around the concept of on-demand printing. BookPrep is a service that will allow users to purchase printed copies of scanned pages of books; book covers will be printed using HP Indigo printers. MagCloud, on the other hand, provides practically anyone with the ability to publish their own magazine. MagCloud takes care of having a magazine printed at a printer location that is nearest to where a reader who purchases an issue is located.
Tags: bookprep, HP innovation, HP latest printer, HP printing, magcloud, on demand printing, printing on demandRelated posts
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Loading ...Posted by PrintFriendly on October 21st, 2009
October 26, 2009 @ 4:15 am
[...] previous post we have already shared with you the new service that will make all that possible – HP BookPrep. The partnership will hopefully lead to the availability of more than half a million rare and [...]