HP’s Piazza platform has the potential to do for print management what Amazon has done for retailing. Like Amazon, the first application for Piazza is about books. For Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the book was a relatively straightforward product that was ideal to start the online retail revolution.
For HP, that same online revolution has put pressure on publishers to manage their costs and adopt a ‘sell then print’ model rather than a ‘print and hope to sell’ business model. This has resulted in Piazza.
But just as Amazon’s ambitions extended beyond books, so HP is automating the management of print across multiple locations and processes while controlling brand image and output quality and curbing costs. Precisely what print management sets out to do.
Piazza is built around a cloud platform, using Amazon Web Services for both security and scaleability. It is pitched at book publishers and will drive volumes of print ready files towards book printers, ideally using HP’s print technology, Indigo or PageWide T series machines.
These inkjet presses are already responsible for more digitally printed books than any other digital press says PageWide vice president and general manager Eric Wiesner. “Our presses print 75% of the world’s inkjet printed books, that’s about 40% of all digitally printed books,” he says. “But that is only 4% of the world’s printed books.”
There is huge scope to grow this market share, though publishers have been slow to switch production to digital. Some is down to concerns about quality and cost, because the unit cost of a book of one is more than the same book when it is one of 10,000. Some is down to the complexity of the production chain and the diversity of formats, styles and presentation that a book may have.
However, Wiesner points to the growing pressures on publishers, not least that their profit margins have not grown with the rise of digital. There is still excess production and waste in the system. The carbon footprint contribution to greenhouse gases is considerable and with 40% of books printed destined to be pulped, the existing structure is not sustainable.
And “according to a survey of publishers, 94% of people believe that digital printing will transform book printing, but less than 44% have a strategy in place to make that happen” he says. Despite this, digitally printed book growth is 4%, double that of printed books in general.
There is also a huge problem of counterfeiting, particularly of text books, representing lost revenue for publishers, which he explains Piazza will help tackle. “The fastest growing market for books is India,” he says. “Across the globe there are a lot of supply chain inefficiencies and as print on demand is proving, people are willing to pay for speed.”
He mentions the opportunity from exploiting the long tail effect of keeping books in print and that from producing tie ins with events, though a more lucrative opportunity may lie with creating customised books for educational courses. Universities are already produced tailored prospectuses customised to the courses that a prospective student might wish to study. It is only a short step to customising course materials once the student arrives on campus, subject to issues around rights issues.
The technology underpinning Piazza will enable a publisher to hook up with print service providers around the world. The printers will need to run SiteFlow, one of the elements of the PrintOS Cloud workflow environment, but there is no requirement to run an HP press. In theory the file might be directed to a platesetter for litho printing. “We are reinventing printing in the publishing market,” says Wiesner.
The publisher will prepare print ready, JDF enabled, PDFs and store these in a content repository in the cloud. In response to orders placed through a website, business management system or other means, the file is extracted, combined with other orders and directed to the appropriate printer.
There is no need for the publisher to raise purchase orders, to create the print ready file suited to that press or for any intervention on the publisher’s part. The software will apply any profiles for paper held by the printer, for any changes to cover artwork, apply the correct ISBN numbers, permissions and imprints for that country, and create a run file that can combine several books in imposed sequence if running an HP press.
“It is a set of tools for the publishing market,” says HP’s publishing innovation manager Michell Weir. “That starts with the content that they own and manage. It gives them the ability to take that content and the ability to automate that through to delivery becomes really important, using a set of interlinked cloud based services.
“It is an inventory management solution that enables book of one production. The printer should never have to touch the file.
“What if I am a global publisher that wants to print with 15 printers, everybody has a different FTP site, while some work with email. There is no global standard methodology for delivering a file, so files are stored all over the place and for many publishers half the challenge is getting the files back from the printers to corral them into a single place where we know that the file is ready.
“This is not a content management solution, it’s a set of tools that lets a publisher do something with the files that makes sense to them.”
Prior to starting on this development with HP Weir had been responsible for the development of Xerox’s Freeflow workflow, winning the Xerox President’s Award in 1997 for her work on digital workflows for book production.
The file is received at the print end via an API and loaded into the production schedule with the job order raised equally automatically, to generate the required number of copies. Adjustments for different formats and sizes of each book are made on the file according to identifiers in the job. The printed reel will in most cases be fed into the finishing line, though inline operation is also possible.
It is not the only inventory management solution out there, but with HP’s backing can be the most extensively used. Others have been created by printers and have been designed to manage production through their particular operation, with regard to production equipment and storage of files on a local server.
Piazza is on a bigger scale, free from the constraints of production equipment and developed to be used by publishers rather than to suit the direct needs of printer providers.
Thus Piazza is able to manage rights for different distribution points, according to whether content is licensed for any particular country and to change format or specification to suit different markets.
However, it is not a free for all. Some standardisation of formats is necessary to fit with the automated book of one production process. This caused concern among the different managers at the publisher concerned that their book would lose shelf impact. Until it was pointed out that these books will never reach a booksellers shelf, being ordered through the internet. “There was a lot of discussion around standardisation,” says Weir. “We had to explain exactly how a digital press works and this switch means that books will never be out of print and that the books are sold before they are manufactured.”
One publisher had accumulated 200 different trim sizes for different titles. This has now been reduced to 12 formats.
Piazza will also manage inventory that is held by the printer on the publisher’s behalf, say a minimum stock level of ten units, feeding back this data into the publisher. And that publisher need not be a book publisher, it can be a publisher of any printed product.
“There is a road map for Piazza,” says Nancy Janes, global head of brand innovation at HP. This will extend the capability into other areas where the brand holds and controls assets that can be printed in different locations around the world. A case in point might be a brand with packaging that is essentially the same, but tweaked for different markets. HP has its eyes firmly on the transformation of printed packaging from labels to corrugated packaging.
Corrugated is a nascent sector, says Wiesner, with less than 1% by volume printed digitally currently while label printing is well down the road with HP as the largest supplier of digital presses to label printers. The opportunity is there to improve and remove waste, either physical or time, from the supply chains. This can be a bigger benefit to the brand than the print production element.
For the moment this is about another level of complexity. HP will need to get Piazza established with the book publishers. Just as Amazon started with books. Look what happened then.
Gareth Ward
Piazza is pitched at book publishers and will drive volumes of print ready files towards book printers around the globe, generating the purchase order, formatting and delivery in a format that allows it to plug directly into the production workflow.
