Océ is a $4 billion international company with physical plants all over the world, including Trumbull, Conn., and Coventry. However, its forte – large-scale document management and printing – doesn’t give it much visibility among consumers. It has begun getting some notice among educators, though, with its Future Authors Workshop, a public-private partnership aimed at improving the writing of students and teaching them printing on demand.
Providence Business News spoke with Océ’s senior director of marketing services, Sheryl Pattek, about the authors program and how printing on demand has the potential to change the way books are published and distributed.
PBN: How long has Océ been offering the Future Authors program?
PATTEK: This is the second summer that we’ve been running the project. We expanded the program this summer to include middle schools, so now we go from middle schools to high schools.
PBN: So far, the program has been limited to South Florida. Do you have any intention of expanding the program geographically?
PATTEK: We’d like to, but the reason this program works is that we have a very strong partnership with the school. It’s really the curriculum as much as it is the technology that makes the program work. We’re in the process of approaching other school districts and seeing if there is a district that wants to partner with us the way we have in South Florida.
PBN: What do the students learn about self-publishing?
PATTEK: The kids learn how the book industry has changed. Publishers used to have to be pretty sure about sales – break-even points and print runs – before taking a risk on a new author. With digital, publishers can take a risk on unknown authors and have smaller press runs, or authors can self-publish.
PBN: Self-publishing has always been an alternative for authors. How has digital changed self-publishing?
PATTEK: Even with [traditional] self-publishing, there is a commitment to a press run and an investment that has to be made. That could be significant, because in order to be cost-effective, they’d have to do a print run of 2,000 to 2,500 books. Now, with digital publishing, you can do print runs with as few as one or two books.
PBN: What kind of reaction do you get from the kids when they see their words in print?
PATTEK: When some of the kids see the book for the first time, they have tears in their eyes, because they had no idea what it was like to become a published author.
PBN: What’s the print run for the book?
PATTEK: Last year it was 1,200. This year it’s 2,000. We give each child 10. Most of the kids are in high school, so they want to use the book for college applications, and then they want copies for their parents and their grandparents and their friends.
This year, the book has been registered with the Library of Congress and priced and will be sold for a month in all the Barnes & Nobles in the county. That way, the book can become a way for the school district to generate some income to support the program on an ongoing basis.
PBN: How do publishers save money with a digital publishing system?
PATTEK: They save money on warehousing. Another area is waste. They don’t have overruns any more. They print what they need or they print on demand. For example, when you order some books from Amazon, rather than going to a warehouse, they actually print the books to order.
Another area of savings is in college, universities and schools. You can imagine how many changes are involved in textbooks from year to year and the cost of trashing them. As textbooks move to the print-on-demand model, they can be changed every semester if they want to.
PBN: How have traditional publishers reacted to print-on-demand technology?
PATTEK: Some of the bigger publishers were nervous about print on demand because they didn’t know how it would affect their business model. They didn’t know if they would lose their bestselling authors to the technology. But popular authors like John Grisham haven’t gone to the print on demand model because economically it doesn’t make any sense.
What’s happened instead is that it allows publishers who understand and embrace the print on demand model to host a wider variety of authors because their financial risk is reduced. So if you look in a Barnes & Noble today, less than 5 percent of what’s on its shelves is from popular authors with large print runs.
At the same time, books that have gone out of print can now be brought back to the market. With the digital model, a book never has to go out of print.
PBN: How soon will it be before bookstores start printing books on demand?
PATTEK: I’m not sure your local bookstore will be doing that any time soon. Printing the book is one thing, but finishing it is something else. The finishing process – putting the covers on the book and trimming them – is still a noisy, messy process that I’m not sure a local bookstore will want to have. •
