Bruce Watermann Talks About Blurb.com Technology

Blurb is an online “self-publishing” company based in San Francisco. The company launched their first products in 2006. I had seen Eileen Gittins, the company’s founder, speak at DSCOOP6 a couple of months ago, so I was thrilled to see Bruce Watermann was appearing on a panel at the Digital Book Printing Forum in New York last week.

Bruce is the company’s SVP, Print Operations. He’s been there since 2005. Before joining Blurb, he worked at Corbis, and before that at a high end photo lab in Seattle, Pacific Color.

Bruce started out with some of the company’s current “vital statistics”, telling us that their annual revenue is now over $50M, and that in 2010, they paid nearly $2M to authors. Almost 50% of the company’s business now originates outside of the US. They have a London office, in addition to SF HQ. They ship to 70 countries, and they’ve just recently begun to localize their web site, starting with French in 2010, and more to come this year. Bruce explained they are very careful about the translations, so they get the nuances of the culture and communicate their brand value in the locality.

But let’s talk about the fun part, the technology. Bruce built a really cool digital network for producing the many products consumers purchase on the company’s web site. They call it the Print Partner Network, or PPN.

The print service providers in the PPN are handpicked. Once an order/job “lands” at one of the PPN companies, they have three days to produce and ship it. Blurb expects less than 1% manufacturing defects, and enforces this with an SLA. Bruce tells us this is being achieved!

The company insists their partners use 100% HP Indigo digital presses for color, and 100% Oce equipment for B&W when producing Blurb products. In the network, partners have Indigo 5000 series, 7000s and 7500s, as well as WS6000s and W7200s. They have even standardized RIPs, insisting on HP SmartStream Ultra or Production Pro.

Bruce told us, however, that the actual printing is “the easy part”. I think most printers would agree with this— when a job is on the press, you’re making money, it is smooth sailing. It’s everything before and after that kills you. Because of this, Bruce told us that the beyond being able to print with the highest quality, the thing that separates the partners they have chosen is Information Technology (IT) expertise, particular binding equipment and skills, and being able to fulfill a quantity of one.

Getting the jobs to the PPN partner consists of three files: XML (job ticket), book cover, book guts. They use the venerable PrintTalk specification (now part of CIP4 JDF, but formerly an industry e-commerce spec originally developed as a standalone consortium in the dotcom era.) Blurb decides where the job will be printed. One ready, the PPN partner pulls the job down to their facility.

Finishing is also standardized, with Blurb requiring partners to utilize ODM and GP2 binding gear; CP Bourg and Horizon for book block creation, and LBS for materials. As an aside, the paper is also dictated, with Blurb working exclusively with NewPage and Mohawk at this time.

Printers are able to dictate their own internal workflow, but fulfillment is prescribed by Blurb, featuring a global shipping partnership with FedEx. Bruce said they hit their high water mark one day in 2010 when they shipped 10,000 packages in a single day!

Self-publishing consumers in their own homes and offices use one of three separate methods to create their books: BookSmart is a desktop client, Bookify is an online creator application, and PDF to Book provides templates for Adobe InDesign. Customers then send their ready-to-publish creations over to Blurb.

Blurb’s creation tools plug into a RESTful API interface that provides pricing, preview, preflight and plugs into e-commerce functionality. From there, the orders flow into a business layer, and then finally into Blurb’s backend system, which they call “BookServe”, that provides routing and other services.

It’s really damn exciting stuff. I consider companies like Blurb, and Lulu (see my recent post about Bob Young’s talk at the Digital Book Printing Forum) to be part of the “new printing industry”, a group in which I also include my own employer, Mimeo.com.

In my opinion, our industry would have a much more vibrant ecosystem if more companies were doing the things we are doing. We’d be able to attract better talent, and explain our place in the digital media landscape much better if more participants had the tech capabilities and the ability to explain those capabilities, like Bruce Watermann did at this event.

Lulu Founder & CEO Bob Young keynotes the Digital Book Printing Forum 2011

Most stories on the blogs and Internet news feeds I read that pay any attention at all to the publishing world are focused on eBooks. Not particularly surprising, since I mostly read tech blogs. So I was thrilled to learn that while the eBook world is growing incredibly rapidly—and the growth is accelerating—the vast majority of books are still printed on paper. Of particularly more interest to me is that the percentage of books printed “on demand”, or digitally in small (less than 10,000) quantities, is very small, but also growing very rapidly. Not as fast as eBooks, but at a good clip. So it’s a robust segment of the printing business, and I like that.

Last Tuesday, April 5^th, I attended the Digital Book Printing Forum in New York. I’d never attended this event before and one big draw for me was Bob Young, who I recognized as the CEO of RedHat (the Linux company.) Bob was previously not someone I associated with the book business. I’m very glad I attended. I really enjoyed his talk. Here is some of what I captured. Bob is also the Founder and CEO of Lulu, a company founded in 2002 that continues to pioneering in the publishing and book business. According to the company's website, more than 1.1 million creators from more than 200 countries and territories have signed up them.

It was a small room at the Marriott Marquis, probably held about 200 people. But before Bob came on to give the keynote, the room was full. I was somewhat surprised, but it wasn't a high cost event, a one-day thing, and NYC is certainly a place where the topic of book printing is still popular.

Bob didn’t have slides. He started out by telling us a very “down home” kind of founding story about Lulu, telling us about how he started the company sort of on a whim in his wife's knitting closet. He further explained to the audience that “he's not a data guy”, so he can’t be held to the predictions and pronouncements he makes in the room.

However, Bob did go out on a limb, and what he said was fascinating. First, he explained that a company called Webcom (which happened to be attending the conference) had at one time printed 1 million manuals for RedHat Linux annually. They did this for 4 years, and then in year 5 of the relationship they printed zero. Computer software manuals had completely disappeared.

Moving on to the eBook market, he basically said Kindle is dead and the sales of the iPad to date prove this, although he and Interquest said that only 5% of iPad purchasers last year were planning to use them for eBook reading. He also said that he thinks that Android will be the dominant eBook platform within 12 months. That’s quite a pronouncement, we shall see!

Then he went on to tell us about Lulu’s business, which is evolving in a fascinating way. Bob said they have about $40M revenue, and publish 20,000 new titles per month. But the really interesting thing is that he said that "self-publishing", meaning "personal self-publishing", which Lulu and a couple of others pretty much invented, is tapped out. He said this has come about due to intense competition, notably from large companies like Amazon. This may also explain why he's cheer-leading the demise of Kindle.

Bob explained that Books are “sold”, not “bought”, like vegetables at the supermarket. He said that the publisher's primary role is sales efforts. I think this may have been part of a talk Bob gives regularly, because in the New York market, I am pretty sure everyone in the room found this very obvious.

But a really interesting thing Bob said about printed books is that they are the "same" as eBooks; I.e., the printed book is another type of delivery mechanism, just like the eBook reader. Only it is paper, and presumably disposable.

Explaining further, he pointed out that there is so much free, high quality content on the internet, on virtually any topic you wish to explore, that one can never consume it all. So for books to be relevant, authors need help selling. And that is Lulu’s role, to help an author sell whether e-delivery or physical delivery is most appropriate; not competing with the author. He was very specific about this.

Bob told us that this self-publishing market is a $200 million market with annual growth of 20% in a $10 billion global publishing business. This sounds pretty good on the surface, but he says that kind of growth is too gradual to be exciting to a company like Lulu (or perhaps, their investors). Interestingly, he says young people don't care much about books at all (it’s an “old school” format for content delivery), instead reading blogs and getting free content on the internet. Data backs this up so far, with eBook reader sales much more robust to older people (>35 years of age).

So where are the opportunities? Bob says newer or more precise content, is the growth area. He gave a very good example of a niche book about photography. Man goes into a camera store where they have 50 books about taking pictures. He wants one about taking pictures of the night sky and finds that such a book doesn't exist. Why doesn’t it exist? The reason, Bob explains, is that the author says "I have 300 pages on how to take pictures of the night sky"; the publisher responds by saying, "that sounds like a short chapter in the book we want you to write". So the book the consumer desired never gets published.

In the wrap up, Bob explains this is the problem Lulu wants to solve. And Bob thinks it’s an exciting, large market, growing rapidly. The company is going to help people, with specific content and their own specific audience (that is unattainable to general interest publishers,) use Lulu’s new APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to create specific books and then market them. Lulu will be the production and distribution method. More on this as details emerge, great topic for this blog!

HP's Cloud Printing Strategy Nicely Articulated

Check out this super article by Louella Fernandez, principal analyst at QuoCirca, via IT-Director.com.

The venue was HP's recent Analyst Summit in San Francisco. The topics ranged from the ePrint web aware printers, photo products and services like SnapFish, new managed print services (MPS) initiatives and the commercial print arena. Fernandez says HP demonstrated a range of products and services and an integrated go-to-market strategy that will enable it to extend the reach for its vast portfolio.

Really fascinating stuff, according to Fernandez, HP‘s Imaging and Printing Group’s (IPG) revenues grew by 7% in 2010, and overall, IPG accounted for 20% of HP’s revenue. Supplies revenue represents 67% of overall IPG revenue, with commercial printer hardware and consumer printer hardware accounting for 22% and 11% respectively.

Fernandez calls out Ricoh and Xerox as the competitors HP most critically needs to address, but also gives them high marks in terms of "breadth and scale" that sets the company apart from the others.

Samsung and Mobile Printing

I must say that Samsung is not the first name I think of when it comes to printing. From my point of view, they have a pretty generic line of relatively low cost monochrome and color laser printers, for individual and workgroup applications. Nothing to get too worked up about in general. I do love their LCD screens, though, owning several of them.

And recently, they've made quite a splash with their Android phones and the Galaxy Tab. These have been well received, albeit not to the same degree as the iPhone and iPad, but that's at least partially because they don't have Steve Jobs whipping up the fan boys into a frenzy.

At CES (the Consumer Electronics Show), held in Las Vegas last week, Samsung introduced wireless mobile printing for Android, ala Apple's AirPrint. Apparently, this is not the first announcement of this kind for Android, with Motorola pre-announcing something called "Motoprint" at the CTIA (the cell phone industry's big confab) last October. This does not seem to be available yet, so we will stay tuned for that.

Samsung's MobilePrint app, as they call it, is available for both Android and iOS mobile devices to connect and print to Samsung wireless printers.

The press release, dated January 5th, 2011, claims that the apps will be free, and will be "built-in" to the Galaxy Tab beginning in 2011. The company claims the application will be compatible with all existing and new Samsung wireless and network printers.

I don't have much in the way of technical details, but the two things that set this announcement apart are the claimed backward compatibility (which is interesting but may also mean the actual printing functionality could be limited) and the availability of the app on both the Google and Apple platforms. Read the press release here.

iPad is... Printing (via AirPrint)

I must say I was pretty blown away when I first saw the Apple "iPad is Amazing" commercial, although since I've seen it about 1,000 times now, I find the music a little annoying. What impressed me about it initially is the fact that it starts out with an "iPad is..." premise, and the first thing it proclaims the iPad to be is, printing! I never doubted that Apple knew the lack of printing was a big gap at launch, but it's still nice to see them promoting it in a big way in a major TV commercial that has now been seen by millions and millions of people. And putting it before the other "amazing" things about the iPad, in fact, is kind of amazing. If you haven't seen the commercial, check it out on YouTube, here.

So let's talk for a moment about what makes this possible on the iPad, which is the technology called AirPrint, requiring Apple IOS 4.2 or later, and an HP ePrint-compatible printer. Today, AirPrint itself only works with HP printers that support ePrint (more on this later.)

According to HP, ePrint evolved from CloudPrint, an innovative technology created by HP Labs, the company's central research and development group. Apple AirPrint on an IOS 4.2 and later device (like an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad) finds printers on WiFi networks and then allows printing text, photos and graphics to them without the need to install drivers or special software.

iPad, iPhone and iPod touch users running IOS 4.2 and later will find a new print function within apps on their device. They can simply tap the "action" icon, then tap the "Print" button, configure printing options, then tap "Print".

A printer must be specifically ePrint enabled. Printing to a device attached to another computer is not possible with AirPrint. There are now several HP printers that support ePrint, and HP maintains a growing list of such devices. The latest one to catch my eye at this writing is the Laserjet Pro CM1415FNW, which is an amazing color laser desktop MFP, at a very attractive price, with an incredible feature set. I believe this is the first Laserjet to support ePrint, the other printers being inkjets. Get the datasheet here.

Printing in the Post PC Era

Over the holidays I did a lot of thinking about this blog, and my only New Year's resolution for 2011 is to post here more regularly. Not because I like hearing myself talk, but because the subject matter has never been more relevant, and is in fact going to heat up this year. That should make it a relatively easy resolution to keep!

Last summer, at the D8 conference, Steve Jobs made some waves when he introduced the idea of the "post PC era." Jobs said the day is coming when only one out of every few people will need a traditional computer. "When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks because that's what you needed on the farms."

"PCs are going to be like trucks," Jobs said. "They are still going to be around." However, he said, only "one out of x people will need them."

Jobs said that this idea makes many PC veterans uneasy, "because the PC has taken us a long ways." And he went on to say, "We like to talk about the post-PC era, but when it really starts to happen, it's uncomfortable," he said.

It's an apt description, and is so much more than another excellent Apple branding campaign. The iPad was met with a lot of excitement, and some skepticism. There is still some skepticism around how publishing, ebooks, magazines, newspapers and other media-related businesses will fare on the new platform. But one thing has become crystal clear since Steve's D8 appearance: the iPad is a major hit, and it is in fact only the beginning of a new computing paradigm.

That paradigm is the fourth major computing shift: the Cloud/Mobile paradigm, which I think is aptly referred to as the "Post PC" era (the first three shifts arguably being the mainframe to minicomputer, minicomputer/workstation to networked PC, and the Internet.)

I realized that this is exactly what we are talking about here. The Rich Internet Printing concept is very much "printing in the post PC era".

Apple's AirPrint, HP ePrint, Google Cloud Printing; whatever Microsoft creates (presumably in the near future) to enable their tablet and cloud printing strategy. Service providers like EFI with PrintMe. Software from a variety of third-party vendors who enable printing from non-PC devices.

David and I are co-authoring a paper for the 2011 TAGA Advanced Technology Conference in Pittsburgh this coming March (visit TAGA's website for more information.) I'm going to use some posts here to vet the topics we are working on for that highly esoteric academic paper, but in a more accessible format.

We will do a deep dive into the applications, and report on the opportunities, challenges and limitations, and success stories. Stay tuned.

Cloud Printing Service Provider. Is it a term we should embrace?

I think the Cloud is here to stay, and I think Cloud is a term that has been embraced far and wide, but it must be used correctly.

The test I would put forth for whether your service or platform is truly "Cloud" is if I can contract for the services you offer without speaking to a human being, and activate/deactivate them when I want to stand them up or tear them down.

There is no "overhead" or startup costs for me to become engaged with you-- I literally can take advantage of the services when I need them, and only pay for them as I am using them.

That's what differentiates Cloud from "ASP" or "SaaS" or just the "plain old Internet". This is a nuance that I think a lot of non-technical people miss and it's driven by a combination of technology and business model.

Companies that use the term Cloud without fulfilling this promise could easily be seen as jumping on the hype bandwagon, and further confuse the market. Mimeo has been called a Cloud Printing Service Provider by Gartner, and we do fit the definition I've provided here. However, we are still very careful to only use this term with audiences we are sure will "get it."