Kodak’s Antonio Perez has nice article in USA today on the printers who printed out the Declaration of Independence.

I like it a lot, and I am very much happy to see a CEO who actually is familiar with the history of printing. On days when I am feeling pessimistic, it seems that this industry is run  by managers who can’t see beyond the edge of their spreadsheets. Nice to be proven wrong.

Happy Independence Day to our neighbours in the USA!

There are two avenues of attack for Kodak to compete with the big boys: Variable data-printing with NexPress and competing in the inkjet arena by lowering the cost of ink. I’ll tackle each one separately.

First, cheap ink for inkjets. Really, this is a no-brainer. HP and Epson have such a lock on the market that if one of the companies didn’t exist, the other one would be in antitrust hell before Bill Gates would have time to shake his head. So you kick the giants where it hurts and go after the fat margins on the ink. Will they have success in the consumer market? Ahhhh, I don’t know, I mean just how cheap are they making the cartridges? Are they making promises written with the blood of their CEO that they will never boost the cost of the ink?

Do you know what would be cool? If they came out with a vegetable-oil-based ink that was sold in a one litre tank (refillable). You hook up the tank to the printer via gravity feed. Oh yeah, and the tank of ink sells for ten bucks. I would buy that printer for sure, as well as every offset commercial shop from here to Bejing via London. Even if the printer sold for 10 times the cost of an equivalent HP or Epson, I bet the commercial guys would go for it. Why? Because the MBA geniuses at HP or Epson don’t understand is that every offset print owner in the world has had to pay off a press at time or another, so they are VERY familiar with TCO - total cost of ownership. Heck, it’s tatooed on their foreheads.

But will Kodak go down that path? Or will they fall prey to the “click-charge” screw game? Boy, don’t you just love that when the sales guy walks in the door with the elaborate “click-charge” Excel spreadsheets? Mmmmmmm, tasty 8^p

Their second strategy is the variable-data printing with Nexpress which has been around as long as hmmm, the internet. Just kidding. Actually, I remember the Nexpress buzz when I joined Creo back in 1997. I’ve never seen one, so I truly speak from ignorance (but that has never stopped me before.) Kodak has a vast amount of technological acumen with regard to variable-data printing via the former Spire RIP development team in Herzlia. Apparently there is some buzz out of Burnaby about giving Prinergy some variable data printing capability but don’t quote me on that, that buzz has been around for about five years.

Now before I started ripping the Nexpress, I just wanted to say that I think variable data technology is pretty cool. If you are doing a mass-marketing campaign, and you can tailor a catalogue mail-out with individual data feeds, then you can up your conversion rate from 1% to 5,10, or even 15%. In theory, a printer who can offer variable data-printing should be able to sell their services at a premium.

So why hasn’t variable-data printing taken off? My guess is that to make the workflow system “work” with variable -data, you need a helluva front-end which hasn’t been developed yet. I never saw the Spire front-end but I evaluated some variable-data software from an independent vendor and it completely sucked, even a experienced system admin would have trouble making it work, and you are talking about digital printing. Remember one of the supposed main advantages of digital printing is that you can get rid of your high-priced (and whiny) prepress sys admin/operators and replace them with cheapo teenages who can’t get a job at Starbucks because their acne is too bad.

Variable data printing needs an operator with a brain or better more intuitive software but the latter requires an real frickin’ software development team, not a group of 2 Indian programmers working on the code in between taking classes on proper call-center etiquette. I know the Spire guys always had problem maintain head count because in printing, you don’t make money selling software, but on the consumables (plates, ink, or click-charges). Variable data printing reduces consumption of consumables, ba-ding.

So what I am saying is that variable-data printing is stuck in purgatory until somebody figures out a business model that works. That’s where a wizard MBA is worth his or her weight in platinum. If Kodak can convince printers to buy their inkjet at a premium because of cheap ink, then they will do fine. If they can build a kick-ass front end for the Nexpress, then they can move that piece of gear too. Easy, easy.

Easy? I’m sorry, I meant to say that’s going to be tremendously hard. The value proposition is there but you are going to need good salespeople who can present a good business plan.  And people really knowledgeable about the traditional printing business.  Oh, and a little bit of courage too, because what I have just said flies in the face of all conventional wisdom of the last fifteen years. But that’s all.

According to business week, inkjet sales dropped at HP by 5%.

Which is fine by me, as I am an inkjet bigot. Why? Let me count the ways, presenting 8 reasons why I hate inkjet.

1. Product teams are run by MBA types who only come within 100 feet of a printing business by accident (and no Kinkos  doesn’t  count)

2. Used ink catridges are small enough to choke seagulls.

3. Ink more expensive than platinium.

4. All printer drivers written for inkjets are coded by retarded teenagers from the republic of Wazerbijan.

5. Patent protection guarantees billions in profit to huge conglomartes like Hewlett Packard and Epson. Color me excited.

6. You want addition to the color gamut?  Please buy our Light Cyan, Light Magenta combo for only an extra $150.

7. Selling pitch of inkjet press manufacturer: Replace your pressmen who want decent wages because they have families to support with 20 year old retard teenagers from the republic of Wazerbijan (no offense to Wazerbijan immigrants who are known to be hardworking and courteous).

8. Ink only slightly less toxic than Agent Orange.

I woulda written ten reasons, but it’s past midnight and I promised wifey I wouldn’t stay up late. Another broken promise.

Personally, I think the high point of QuarkXpress was 3.1, which was released in 1992 or some year like that. I still remember my service bureau days when the senior guys would cherry-pick all the Quark jobs and leave the junior guys with Painmaker and Corel.

BTW, which was worse, the first version of Corel for Windows 95 (fonts would explode on output. I.. kid.. you.. not) or Painmaker for windows 3.1 (film would come out portrait, no matter what setting you chose. You could drive your newbie operators insane if you ordered them to output landscape)?

Anyways, fun times. I could go on and on for ages bashing Quark. But this post is unusual in that I this post is to praise Quark, not to bury. You see, I just did a Quark upgrade on one of the Macs today in the shop.

Oh, you think. Is that all? Well, before you think it’s no small accomplishment, just read my post on upgrading to CS3.

How long did it take to upgrade Quark? It asked for the serial number (on the box) and then the serial number of the last upgrade (found by checking the “about Quark” menu). Once those numbers were typed in, it did the installation. Then it activated itself on-line. Total time: 15 minutes.

Contrast that with the freaking nightmare of a CS3 upgrade. Wants the serial number of the upgrade package. Wants the serial number of the last upgrade package. No wait, that’s not enough, then it wants the serial number of the upgrade before the last frickin’ upgrade.

Then after all is said and done, it barfs on activation and I have to reformat the hard drive according to Adobe technical support. Thanks guys, I hope Quark 8 can cure cancer when it’s released and the whole franchise comes back from the dead to kick you guys in the nuts because a little competition is needed here.

Love, DJ

So it’s been very interesting over the last six months working in the printing industry. As a few of my readers know, I have been working in the printing (prepress) industry for more than 15 years. I worked in the product development group at Creo for seven of those years, wearing more than a few hats (won’t bother to name them all).

After leaving Creo (now Kodak) in 2004, I started my own consulting business. I really, really wanted to get out of the “production” side of prepress/printing, because I felt there would be no room for growth in that segment for many, many years. At Creo I worked on a lot of Prinergy products and visited a great many shops that had implemented Prinergy system and witness the fantastic growth in productivity that resulted from modern day workflow system like Prinergy. And in year 2001 or thereabouts, the printing industry stopped growing.

Increased productivity + Stagnant growth = Job Losses.

So I paid the mortgage and the groceries for a couple of years as a project manager and/or business analyst about one year ago a friend of mine got me interested in internet marketing. And that’s pretty much my focus now, I do search engine optimization and pay-per-click and affiliate marketing.

I do internet marketing for one of my customers Printcraft Solutions but I don’t write much about it on this blog as in this business, what do that works, is not something you broadcast to the world. What I will say is this: man we are smoking like Steve McQueen with this stuff. Good traffic to the web site and business is looking up and believe me, with the Canadian dollar at par, not every Vancouver printer can say that.

So this is my sales pitch. If you are an offset printer and you are not located in the province of British Columbia, I can drive traffic to your site. And not just crappy traffic, but good local traffic that is looking for the services that you provide and will turn into paying customers. How will I do this? I won’t write how it’s done on the blog but this is what I can offer. For the first five (NOTE: jUNE 9TH, TWO LEFT) reader who comment on this post, I will do this for free:

1. Review your website for important keywords that will rank you in the search engines.
2. Review your website for OTHER factors that will boost your rankings.
3. Check your competitors and see how THEY rank in the search engines.
4. Give an estimate of how hard (or easy) it would to boost your site in the rankings or draw traffic to it.

Some marketing companies would charge $100s for these services but I will do it for free, but remember you MUST be an offset printing business and you cannot be located in British Columbia.

Here is a story about a guy who made $60,000 a month off the internet with multiple web sites and Adsense.

I’ll summarize the story for you if you don’t have time to read it. Smart guy takes a few pages of text, buys thousands of domain names, automates the process of building web sites and puts Adsense on every page. After a certain period of time, he rakes in $60,000 a month which is basically pure profit.

Of course, he gets caught out by Google after a certain period of time but did you get the point of the story? The internet (and Google) needs content so much that even if you provide crap content, you can monetize it. Which bring me back to the printing business.

Even the smallest printer with a Prinergy system has a collection of PDF files that collectively numbers in the 1000s of pages. And the larger web printers probably have millions of pages indexed. What if those PDF pages in a Prinergy system were converted to HTML and then put on a web site to be indexed by Google? How much revenue would that generate?

Do printers own the copyright on those pages in their Prinergy system? No. But how hard would it be possible to enable revenue-sharing with the copyright owners? There are already many models for such systems operating like that on the web.

Actually, I think the monetization of Prinergy PDF repositories will begin to occur in the next three years, although it won’t be driven by the printers, but by the Adsenses-savvy marketeers who will see an opportunity to buy up the data repositories sold by bankrupt printers. Just a hunch.

Schedule a golf tournament for the prepress staff and the pressmen. No, seriously, there’s a 12:30 pm tee-off time today for Printcraft employees and a huge job came in this morning, with about 11 hours of platemaking scheduled for today and Monday.

Ooops, the cyan plate just came out shifted three inches to the left. See the prepress operator have a “conversation” with the Lotem Quantum platemaker.  Ooomph, magenta is coming out okay. Maybe she can make it to the golf course today.

Wait, I just heard her talking to the screen again, about 15 feet away. That’s usually not a good sign. Time for this sys admin/webmaster to go for a coffee break.

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine asked me if I was worried about “electronic paper” technology taking a huge bite out out of the printing industry.
Not really, I said. Before a technology is applied to consumer applications, it is mostly used in certain niche industries and it can take years, if not decades for the technology to be put in products geared to the average consumer.
Duh, wrong again. I’ve noticed every since I became a Dad some years ago, my forecasting skills have undergone a precipitous decline. It must go with the territory.
Anyways, in case you missed it, the Amazon Kindle is now back in stock, it had been sold out as of last Christmas.
The Kindle is an ebook reader that uses E Ink, a technology that is able to form letters on the screen by rearranging chemicals. Or, I should say, because you read the sceen using reflected light and not backlight, it looks a lot like print on paper.
Wait, there’s more. The Kindle uses cellphone networks as it connectivity option, and its provided free by Amazon.
In short, in my humble opinion, North American book printers are screwed marginalized. Of course, if book printer companies are anything like newspaper companies, it will take them a good 3 to 5 years to realize they are completely hosed.

Great, great thread on PrintPlanet what to do (and also should you do it?) when the designer sends in a password-protected PDF file and refuses to give you the damn password.

To make a long story short with regard to the technical solution, Apple’s color sync utility allows you to open up the PDF files and strip out the password. Thank you, Apple.

Of course, there is also heated discussion on the copyright issue. Essentially, under copyright law, a printer can be held liable for damages for cracking the PDF file as the designer holds copyright. The thread is very interesting as there are arguments made for both sides.

My take on the subject? Well, my experience with legal matters is this: Is it better to allow damages to occur to you (or your company, or your customer - whatever) and then try to recover your damages in court OR is it better to protect your interests at the present time and risk being sued for whatever at a future time?

Yeah, that’s what I thought too.

With regard to the moral issues of copyright, I trained as a journalist in university, then spent a fair bit of time at Creo in the software divsion. There is no way to avoid appearing just a little bit cynical about this matter so I’m just going to say it: There is no moral issues whatsoever with regard to copyright, except perhaps when the RIAA goes after some wee old grandmother who downloaded the birthday song from the internet to play to her grandson.

Look! A month of free movies from Blockbuster:

Someday my grandchildren will ask me: What was the biggest disaster you ever witnessed? And I will answer them: The summer of 1998, the day Time Magazine was late at Roto-Smeets.

To say it was a disaster is an understatement. To miss the deadline of Time Magazine back then was an apocalypse, unforgiveable. When the Platemaster system went down, the board of directors was notified as well as the executive team of Roto-Smeets, one of the largest printers in Europe. Time specified in their contract that if you were late, then the contract was broken and they could go elsewhere. And I was there when it happened.

I was actually there to do damage control over another bloop-up, otherwise known as Prescript I. You see, back then, Creo didn’t have the PDF workflow today known as Prinergy. Instead it had a Postscript-based system called Platemaster, which was actually years ahead of its time. That workflow had a fanatical following that held onto the system years after Prinergy started to dominate the large printer space. But it did have some flaws, like no trapping. Or color management. Oh yeah, and because it was Postscript-based, and because back then Windows servers topped out at 350mhz, every once in a while the RIP would barf on a imposed signature of Postscript, usually at the worst possible time.

Prescript was suppose to fix the RIP barfs, by “cleaning” the Postscript so that there would be no surprises at the end of the line, when it was time to make plates. I joined the Prescript team just after the release of Prescript I. How well did it work? About as well as any version I of any software product. Not well enough (cough) to meet the expectations of our customer base.

Creo Europe was especially upset about Prescript. Okay, they were pissed. A lot of big deals were on the edge because Prescript had been advertised to fix the RIP barfs which were killing the platemakers and it when it had been released, it stank out the joint.
Earlier in the year, I had been sent on a fact-finding tour to gather problem files and generally offer my Johny-Canuck butt to various customers so they could kick it and feel better. Now I had returned with version 2 to save the day, be a hero, and not incidentally, get some deals closed so that Creo Europe could have a good quarter.

Roto-Smeets was one of those customers that needed some impressing. And then one of their Platemaster systems blew up. Okay I wasn’t actually there when the moment of disaster struck, it was actually Matthieu Bossan who bore eyewitness testimony. Matthieu was one of two (count ‘em, two) application engineers employed by Creo Europe in 1998 (The other one was Tomas Leferverbre. We also had a demo specialist by the name of Stefan Steinle who knew his way around Platemaster. Stefan had the joy of demonstration Prescript to various customer - “Here is Prescript ripping its way through a job…, Scheiße! it crashed again…”)

So Matthieu goes in to install a service pack on one of the Platemaster servers. He installs the service and does a reboot. He waits for the server to come back up again. And waits… and waits. Baby that server is hard down, as in hardware down. Service call goes into DEC and the parts won’t come in until after Time Magazine is due to hit the trucks.

Now the Roto-Smeets guys weren’t dumb, they had TWO platemaster systems. But in the summer of 1998, ad revenue for TIME was good and the size of the magazine had grown and grown, meaning more pages and more signatures and more plates that had to be imagined in finite amount of time So some calculations were made and oh scheiße they weren’t going to make ALL plates in time according to the contract.

And that’s where things stood the day that we will suppose to go into Roto-Smeets and do the Prescript II install. Everybody was in shock. We were told not to wear any Creo golf shirts or T-shirts or anything like that. But the Creo Europe guys were happy to see us from Vancouver. Rolo-Smeets was based in Holland and one thing about the Dutch is that they are raised by their moms and dads to be nice to Canadians (This is because of WWII, when the First Canadian Army liberated Holland from the Nazis in 1944. Every year in my hometown of Ottawa, there is a tulip festival when the Dutch send bulbs in gratitude).

So there we were, a group of Canadian stuck in the plant where Time was late, with a few Creo Belgians who made sure the Canadians were close at hand when the Dutch customers hovered around. Paul B. eventually showed up with the server that we were supposed to install Prescript on. Paul was so like many other prepress sys admins I meet over the years, capable and tough and squeezed on one side by buggy software and systems that didn’t quite work well together, and squeezed on the other side by upper management that didn’t understand IT very well but knew the cost of everything. So Paul was under a lot of pressure, and had been for quite awhile.

So I set to work on the server and of course the Prescript II application doesn’t want to install. Two hours later, the script that should have taken 3 minutes to run kept barfing. Of course this was the cherry on top of the icing of a scheiße cake. Finally we figure it out and I remember the exact solution more than 10 years later. For some strange reason the CD drive was mapped to the C: drive on the computer and on Windows NT 4.0 that causes the installer to abort. So we mapped the CD-ROM to another letter and it worked. Then Paul pulled out some crappy Postscript files that causes Prescript I to barf and they worked through Prescript II just fine. So we were able to retreat with some dignity that day.

The very next day I was part of a team to fly into Norway to install Prescript at another hot site. We nearly got stuck in Oslo when the unions in Norway decided to call a general strike. We asked just what the heck they were striking over but nobody could tell us the reason why, they had so much stinking oil up there and it was a nice summer day so why not call a general strike. There was only one flight out of the country in three days and we made that flight, the plane had been allowed to take off because it had organs aboard that were needed for a transplant patient in France.

When all the dust settled Roto-Smeets didn’t lose Time and eventually ordered a third Platemaster system. They may or may not have used the incident to get first dibs in Europe on a super-secret product that Creo was working on at the time, code name Araxi. I joined that team in autumn of 1998 and after about 3 name changes, the Araxi team released Prinergy in late 1999. Roto-Smeets was the first European customer of Prinergy and they made the first plate in Europe from the Prinergy system. I know this for sure because I was there when the plate was imaged. It was a VLF plate, 16-up, and Prinergy ate the signature like it was ice cream and spat out the plate so fast that Roto-Smeets never had to worry about being for Time, or any other job, every again.

And so Prinergy was released and the world changed for so many of us in the prepress universe but it was so very groovy because we were at the center of it all. The future looked to be without limits as Creo grew and grew and the dot com boomed and whatever we touched seemed to be put on the verge of a wonderful transformation. Like a previous generation in 1968 we had our summer of limitless possibilities and like that generation that had the betrayal of Watergate and the tragedy of Vietnam, we had the dot com crash and September 11th, 2001.

As for the European guys, Paul got eventually promoted and it still working at Smeets as far as I know. Matthieu got kicked upstairs to management. Tomas kept working in apps until I lost touch with him. Stefan moved to Vancouver and became the Prinergy product manager for about 3 years until he moved back to Munich with a wife and a baby - a little Canuck baby. As for me, I live in a little house in Vancouver with my wife and three small children who are sweet and innocent (like we all were once) and with a future that has limitless possibilities.

And so it goes.