HP’s Valiant Effort for the Sake of Printing

According to Cnet.com, on Wednesday Oct. 21, HP will announce two new printing initiative at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. The two new projects, BookPrep and MagCloud are designed to aid items that traditionally have been difficult or expensive to print in getting to the consumer. These come in response to a paradigm shift in the publishing industry where traditionally items have been printed in advance, sent to locations in the hopes they would sell, and what doesn’t sell ends up being discarded and now there is building consensus for printing on demand. Andrew Bolwell of HP said that two billion magazines, equal to 62 percent of what’s printed annually, get sent to landfills each year. The statistics for books are equally sobering; 4 percent of books printed will actually ever make it to the shelf to be available for purchase.

Book Prep

This new service from HP takes scans of book pages, automatically cleans them up, and the end result is a book ready for printing on demand. HP has partnered with both Amazon and Google for this project. Google has provided scanned books and Amazon will act as the retailer for these products. The covers of the books will be created with HP Indigo printers and the printed at a variety of on-demand print houses. The project is more about older, public-domain books rather than current books.

MagCloud

This new service is basically serves as a custom magazine printing site. Anyone can actually go in an use it (it’s been online since February) to create a single printed publication for a specific region or any other factor for that matter. When an issue is purchased, it is printed in geographic proximity to the end user (if possible) to save on shipping costs. Keep in mind, however, that this service is just for magazine printing, it does not offer any types of subscription services or automatically handle printed advertising.

For more information, you can read more online or on page B1 of the paper edition of the Wall Street Journal.