When is the best time to print your trade book on an offset sheet fed press?

In today’s marketplace, if you are printing a standard single color trade book on a sheet fed press, you are either paying too much or dealing with a company that can’t possible stay in business.

The common notion in printing is that traditional offset sheet fed printing presses fills the gap between short run digital or offset quantities and longer run web printing quantities. That may have true five years ago, but it is not true today. Minimum web quantities have lowered to the point that they meet the maximum cost-effective quantity capable of being produced on the digital press, thus eliminating the need for the sheet fed press for standard book printing.

Printing pricing is no mystery. There are two, and only two, components that go into a printing price. These two components are “setup” and “run”. There’s an old saying that the first book is very expensive but they get real cheap after that. The lower the setup cost, the lower the quantity which can be produced cost-effectively. The beauty of the digital press is the extremely low setup cost. The downside of the digital press is its high running cost (relative to other methods). The web press used to have a very high setup cost and a very low running cost which left room for the sheetfed press which had a moderate setup and run. This has change with the new generation of web presses.

The exercise below will demonstrate how this all works. I have chosen to compare a digital printing facility, a sheetfed printing facility and a web facility. The two offset facilities are capable of running 32 page sections/ signatures. The comparative pricing is based on the following specifications.

• Trim Size – 5 ½ X 8 ½
• Number of pages – 96 plus cover
• Prep – Output from PDF files
• Paper: Text- 50# Offset Cover – 10PT C1S
• Ink: Text- Black Cover – 4 color plus Lamination
• Binding – Perfect
• Quantities – Based on 100, 500, 1,000 and 10,000 copies

Setup consists of prep, proof, plates, press makeready, paper makeready and bindery makeready. Run consists of press run, paper run and bindery run. These numbers are from actual printing companies but are only intended to be used as a guide.

Startup

1. Prep – There is no real prep with a digital press aside from preflighting your supplied file to make sure that it is going to work. In this demo, the sheetfed plant is still using negatives, while the web printer is direct-to-plate. If the sheetfed printer were direct-to-plate, their prep charges would be in line with the web plant.
2. Proof – Printing a proof in a digital shop is very much like clicking the “print” button on your own computer, thus making it very inexpensive. The sheetfed plant makes “Book Blues” which is a process of making a photo proof from the negatives produced in prep. The web shop produces a digital proof much like the digital shop. The proofing systems can vary from shop to shop as will the price of a book proof.
3. Plates- The digital press is the winner here because there are no plates. The other two processes require printing plates to be made either from the negatives or directly from the digital file. The CTP (Computer to Plate) plates are generally slightly more expensive than traditional plates made from negatives due to the cost of the plate making equipment.
4. Press Makeready – The digital printer, again, is the hands down winner. There is no makeready, just the “click” of a button. This is the area where the modern web press starts to pull ahead of the sheetfed press. Not long ago, the web makeready took considerably longer than the sheetfed press. Today’s “0” makeready web presses allow the press crew to hang plates on one unit while the other unit is running another press form so there is really only a single makeready no matter how many forms are printed. This single feature is what is turning many sheetfed book presses into boat anchors.
5. Bindery Makeready – The bindery makeready in a digital shop is low because the binder itself is not much more than a glorified toy compared to other commercial perfect binders. The sheetfed shop lags behind the web press because the press is delivering a flat sheet that needs to be folded into a signature before it can be perfect bound. The web press delivers folded signatures ready for binding.
6. Paper Makeready – Once again, the digital press wins because every book block off the digital press is usable. Sheets of paper, used by the sheet presses cost more per pound than the rolls used by the web press but have a slight advantage on the makeready because the sheetfed press does not spoil as much paper as the web on startup. That advantage is quickly lost when production copies are run.

As you can clearly see, the sheetfed press does not compete on the initial setup with the modern web. Even if the prep, plates and proof were the same, assuming that the sheetfed plant had CTP (computer-to-plate) that would only lower the $1759 setup to $1421 vs. $886 for the web.

Run

1. Print Run - This is where the web press wins. While the digital press has a fast setup, there is no savings on the run because the digital press runs the same speed whether it’s running 10 books or 1000. The sheetfed press runs much slower than a modern web press. While web presses have a higher hourly rate than the sheetfed press, the cost per thousand impressions is always lower on the web due to speed.
2. Bindery Run – Once again, the digital plant is at a huge disadvantage when it comes to binding long runs. The equipment is slow and labor intensive. The sheetfed process will always include folding the flat sheets so it will always be higher than the web.
3. Paper Run – The digital is the winner here because there is no spoilage and no excess trim. As I said above, sheets cost more than rolls so as the presses get running the web press will under consume the sheetfed press to its advantage.

Conclusion – The digital press, with its low setup and high run rate is the clear choice for up to around 500 books. From that point on, the web’s efficient running rate takes over and it’s relatively high setup is amortized to the point that it will never be less expensive to run anything other than web. The sheetfed press gets lost in the shuffle. There are no secret presses or processes. If your printer has a sheetfed press he has to charge more than his web counterpart. On the other side, if your sheetfed printer is matching or beating comparable web pricing, watch out! The old saying goes, “You can’t take a loss and make it up in volume”. It just doesn’t work that way. In the past 30+ years, I can hardly count on both hands the number of printers who tried to compete in an area where logic dictated that they shouldn’t be able to compete, only to have them end up in the action notices section of the paper. Technology is a double edged sword, cheered by some and damned by others. Unfortunately the marketplace does not care that a printer still has 60 more “easy” payments due on an old technology.

Is there any reason to run any book on a sheetfed press? The answer to that question is “yes”, but only for special projects. By special projects I mean special trim sizes that don’t efficiently fit on a web press. Sheetfed presses are also are used for high quality coffee table books on expensive coated papers. But for single color standard trade books… not unless you want to pay a premium or take a chance that your job will be in the “plant” when the sheriff puts the lock on the door.

Need a cover designed or complete book layout? Try www.BudgetBookDesign.com . - Only $250 for original cover design. Complete text layout from $250.

If you have a question pertaining to the publishing production process, please feel free to contact me at ron@rjcom.com.

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