President’s Corner - David Taylor
Welcome to this new edition of the Lightning Source customer newsletter. We hope you like the new format but let me immediately apologise for the mix of American and British spellings that you will encounter. We took the path of least resistance and decided that the author of each piece should be allowed to spell in their local language! Given the fact that I split my time between our US and UK offices I have had to give careful thought to which spelling I should adopt…
The late and great John Lennon once rather pithily commented that life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. The world of print on demand is certainly changing at an increasingly fast pace both from a technological point of view and a market point of view. We have seen some significant developments within both spheres in the last few months.
On the technological side, the capabilities of digital printing continue to develop apace. In the five years that I have been with Lightning Source, I have seen advances in both quality and speed; the next two years promise even further advancement as the new generation of ink jet printers come fully on stream. Similar advances in binding and finishing technologies promise to close the gap even further between offset produced books and digitally birthed books. Our aim is to make a Lightning Source produced book as indistinguishable as possible to an offset produced book both in terms of print quality and also in terms of binding and finishing.
Listening to and responding to what our customers want is something that we place at the very centre of all that we do at Lightning. Every development, every enhancement to our services and capabilities, starts with understanding the requirements of our customers. I am therefore especially delighted that we now have two strategic user groups operating in both the US and UK. The UK group has been meeting for a number of years and the US one has now been running for a little over a year. The groups are of enormous value to us as they allow our executive team to hear directly from key customers what services and products they need from us.
There is little doubt that the ability to drive down inventory and to print books as close to the customer as possible are two aspects of print on demand that are playing to an increasingly receptive gallery given the global economic slowdown that we are still living through. Saving cash, reducing costs, keeping books alive so that no sale is ever missed become even more attractive in such times.
Linking scalable one off digital print capabilities to a network of distributors and resellers has been the hallmark of Lightning’s capabilities since the day that the first IBM machine was installed in Ingram Book’s warehouse in La Vergne, Tennessee. Over the last eleven years, we have both grown that network and made it work even faster such that Lightning produced books are now, for example, supplied back to Ingram Book within four hours of ordering.
Our intention is to continue on that path, increasingly on a global scale so that we can offer our customers even more choice in terms of how you deliver your books to your customers. Our recent announcement about our partnership with the Espresso Book Machine is part and parcel of that strategic intent. Over the weeks and months ahead we shall be making more announcements in this area as we develop a genuine global on demand print and distribute capability.
Have a great summer and thank you for your business.