BOOK PUBLISHING is a business that has traditionally involved a certain level of gambling. The fixed costs of offset lithographic printing, the technology normally used to print books, means that economies of scale are only reached at certain points, generally over 1,000 copies.

To make a return, publishers need to be certain that they can sell these copies before they can commit to a run. Conversely, if a book sells out, getting more copies on the shelves involves a further gamble that a second run will be worthwhile. As a result, many titles go out of print, wasting opportunities for authors and publishers.

A Dublin-based printing company is offering a solution to the problem for publishers. Gemini International is a digital printer and partner of Xerox that is offering publishers a printing service that makes it viable to print quantities as low as 50 books.

Digital printing has been associated to date with the production of manuals and other relatively low value printed products but Gemini and Xerox organised a seminar for Irish book publishers recently to explain how the technology works and the opportunities it provides for the book publishing industry.

“Publishers and bookshops have indicated that the recession has reduced the retail demand for books by as much as 30 per cent,” explains David Jones, business development manager at Gemini.

“One effect has been to encourage publishers to produce smaller quantities of a title. Digital printing offers publishers the opportunity to do that without increasing the unit cost or reducing quality which would be a problem with traditional offset-litho printing,” says Jones.

“The vast majority of printed pages are black text on a white background. That’s what we do best. We can produce 50,000 A5 pages an hour and we can do that 24 hours a day if we need to.”

So what does it cost? Jones says that a typical 200-page A5 paperback perfect bound book with a colour cover and 200 copies can be printed for less than €3 a unit. A further advantage of digital book printing is that it cuts down the need for warehousing and holding stock.

Gemini was established in 1973 in Herbert Street, Dublin 2, as a secretarial, photocopying and printing bureau and has grown significantly over the years.

It has invested over €1.6 million in Xerox digital printing presses and book finishing technology in recent years.

So far this year it has already produced well over a million books and booklets using digital printing technology.

Gemini’s clients are exporting to France, Belgium, Italy, Spain and the UK which Jones says is a welcome development in a sector dominated by the threat of low-cost printing from China and other low-cost centres.

“The greatest number of books written by budding authors are rejected and confined to obscurity not because they are poorly written but simply because they are considered to be ‘non-commercial’.

“Digital book production, offers realistic opportunities for publishers to extend their author base and keep titles always in-print with low-cost, small quantity production,” he says.

Gemini is following a worldwide trend, according to Mark McPhillips, general manager of Xerox Ireland, who says that books represent the biggest single digital print opportunity over the coming decade. Research by Interquest, he says, reveals that this market is now growing by 26 per cent per annum.

Niche publishers, meanwhile, are enjoying the advantages. One of Gemini’s clients is French-born and Dublin-based Gilbert Dawed of Avatar Media, who publishes about 40 specialist French language political titles for export to his native country every year.

Dawed typically prints about 250 first-run copies of each of his books and if they are successful, generally reprints quantities of 50-100.