Comment by gucci-on-fleek
7 days ago
> The older books were printed using a process called offset printing. [...] it produces higher quality books. The newer books are printed with digital printing, which is just a fancy version of the laser (typical) or inkjet printer you have at home. [...] The result is a worse quality book
Offset printing doesn't necessarily give better results than an inkjet/laser printer. My cheap laser printer from Costco produces much better output than most newspapers, and slightly better output than most old paperbacks. Fancy magazines are also printed using offset lithography and they do indeed have better print quality than my cheap old printer, but if I bought a better printer, then they'd be tied on quality again.
> It needs large economies of scale to be financially viable
Yes, but it needs much fewer copies than you'd expect. I help publish a small magazine [0], and we print it using offset lithography. We print roughly 700 copies of each issue, 3 issues a year, and 100 pages per issue. When I priced it out a couple years ago, offset printing was still cheaper than print-on-demand as long as we were printing at least ~200 copies.
Now, 200 copies is still quite a lot, but it's small enough that nearly every non-vanity-published book should have no problem selling that many copies. My impression is that the move to POD is not to reduce printing costs, but to reduce warehousing costs and the risk of overproduction. This is mostly a non-issue for us, since all the subscribers pre-pay for the whole year upfront and we mail the copies as soon as they're printed, but is much more of an issue for books where some unknown number of people will buy copies over some unknown amount of time.
The other big advantage of POD is that you can print it close to where the buyer lives. For the magazine that I help with, the cost of printing is almost a rounding error compared to the cost of international shipping, so it wouldn't surprise me if this is a major motivator for the big publishers too.
> Separately, paper quality has gone down industry-wide. Paper mills are simply choosing to focus on higher volume papers like those used in cardboard instead of producing fine paper.
Ah, that is not something that I was aware of, but now that you mention it, it does seem to match my impressions.
I don't believe that even a high end home/office printer can produce better quality prints than the best offset lithography practices.
One reason that offset lithography has better quality is because of the ink, which can be mixed for a specific print job (called spot colors). Regular CMYK printing cannot achieve the color space that spot colors can.
Another reason is that typical offset lithography processes produce images with 2400 DPI, and it can go even higher than that. The highest DPI I've seen on a inkjet printer was 1200.
Digital printers, as in the fancy inkjets used to print at scale, can also use spot colors and I wouldn't be surprised if they could do more than 2400 DPI. They are giant machines that cost millions of dollars.
> I don't believe that even a high end home/office printer can produce better quality prints than the best offset lithography practices.
Sure, but not many products are printed using the best offset lithography practices, most are just using whatever's cheapest.
> One reason that offset lithography has better quality is because of the ink, which can be mixed for a specific print job (called spot colors). Regular CMYK printing cannot achieve the color space that spot colors can.
Yeah, spot colours are pretty cool, but my impression was that they tended to be used in things like packaging or books with hundreds of thousands of copies printed, not things that you could conceivably replace with with POD. Or am I mistaken here and spot colours are more widely used than I thought?
> Another reason is that typical offset lithography processes produce images with 2400 DPI, and it can go even higher than that.
Wouldn't that only be useful for greyscale though? I doubt that you could get good enough registration for 2400 DPI to be useful with multiple plates. Or is registration precise enough these days?
> The highest DPI I've seen on a inkjet printer was 1200.
These printers claim to be able to print at 2400 DPI [0] [1], but I'm pretty skeptical that the quality would actually be that good.
[0]: https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/pixma-ip8720#tech-spec-data
[1]: https://www.brother-usa.com/products/hll9410cdn#Print