Introduction to my GRCP101 Final Project

For my Final Project for GRCP101 I have decided to research the area of Electronic Publishing.

There are many types of Electronic Publishing and methods of Publishing but I would like to focus my research on Desktop Publishing in the print industry and the inventions and developments of publishing within that industry.

I shall give a brief overview of Electronic Publishing in general but for the most I shall concern my findings to Desktop Publishing. The title of this Final Project is “From the Printing Press to the Electronic Press”.

REASON I Choose this field of Research?

Given that I have spent many years in this industry. I feel this would be a very strong topic for my research. I would also like to include the different career paths in this industry from Production Artists, Graphic Designers, Digital Operators and the death of some careers also example the Plate Maker. I feel my research will be very useful to anyone who is thinking of entering into the Print industry, either as a Graphic Designer, Production Artist or a Digital Operator. This will help people decide if this career path is right for them.

What is Electronic Publishing?

So what is Electronic Publishing? To fully understand what the term Electronic Publishing means, we must first look at the word publishing and its aspect. Publishing goes through 3 stages, publish, publisher, and finally publishing. Publish means to issue, for sale or distribution, to the public printed, reproduced textual or graphical material. In order to publish one needs a publisher. A publisher is simply a person or company who publishes books, periodicals, multimedia etc., and finally, publishing is the business or activity of a publisher.

By adding the word electronic in front, it does not change the meaning of publishing, but the publisher does it electronically and with no paper involved. There are some exceptions to this rule in Desktop Publishing where the publisher sends electronic files to a printing press for final output to paper for distribution. This same principle applies to Digital Printing, which will be explained in more detail in this research paper.

There are various forms of electronic publications, ranging from books, newspapers, magazines, websites, CD ROMs, DVD, ebooks, E-journals, digital libraries, manuals and Social Networking. With escalating paper and publishing costs, magazine publishers and the academic community is now turning to electronic publishing as a way to reduce cost. On the other hand, copyright issues are limiting the amount of articles that newspapers are putting forth electronically.

Future potential in DTP

Future potential/developments for the Industry:

The desktop publishing industry has changed very fast over the last twenty five years, but litho printing has remained the main chosen method for large print runs. With the introduction of digital printing in the last 12 years this was a major brake through in the way one could output straight to colour without the need of a printing press.

Still digital printing could not match the large print run of Litho, until now, in the last couple of years there has been great developments in the technology in digital printing, larger machines have been developed to handle larger print runs with different types of paper stock.

The future of digital printing in the next 10 years will see the demise of Litho printing; CTP will cut costs in the process of media distribution in desktop publishing. For example Kodak’s Versamark VX5000 is capable of print speeds of 500 fpm (150 mpm) handles very heavy-duty production, yielding more than 2,000 pages per minute with an exceptionally low operation cost per page.

The VX5000e prints at 328 fpm (100 mpm) and excels at printing high-quality graphics and small text (down to 4 point) at 300 x 1200 dpi. Completely integrated end-to-end printing and finishing, with pre-and post-processing equipment tightly integrated into the paper handling, including: roll unwind, sheeting, fixed perforating, selective perforating, punch, tractor hole punching, fan-folding, sheet/stack, roll rewind, and web cleaner. Before web Litho printing could only complete this task.

Kodak’s  new digital printing machine "Versamark VX5000”

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