[s-cars] RE: urS4 Bentleys

[CyberPoet]

While it is true that web-offset and drum print work is very costly to
set-up (the more pages in the document, the more costly), there are
alternatives in the printing market that make such limited-run
documents viable, albeit at a higher per-piece print cost. Since the
documents in question are black and white, on-demand printing can
satisfy single-copy runs from a Xerox Docutech or similar, and for
short runs (500 copies) a Heidelberg GTO makes cost-effective sense as
well. By using the single-copy run concept, the upfront costs for the
Bentley corp would be nil (given that they already have the prepress
layouts), or little (to convert them to PDF), and they would be a
recoupable profit margin the back-end that would justify the process
(since it's a new run effectively, the pricing could be modified
against the old versions to ensure the same or larger margins). And
here lies the problem: given that they already offer the product in CD
form, the motivation to rob their CD sales may be lacking (their cost
per copy there is under $3) and that may be the primary hold-back --
any sales would have to offset their margins on the CD version ($90
per?), which when added to the one-off print costs make the books
prohibitively expensive.

Cheers
=-= Marc Glasgow

On Wednesday, August 13, 2003, at 05:42  PM,
s-car-list-request at audifans.com wrote:

> Bill,
> Being in the corporate design/marketing business, I have contracted
> many
> printing/manufacturing firms. The sad reality is when it comes to
> offset
> printing the set-up costs are pretty high. Once everything is set up
> and you
> have a print run of 10,000 or more then you're able to diminish those
> one-time costs over a large number of units. Don't forget once you get
> that
> stuff printed, you have to fold, trim, and bind it.  This equipment
> also has
> some significant set-up costs. Even if we had 5,000 people interested,
> those
> one time costs along with cost of paper and shipping may not make this
> possible.
>
> Serge, bursting bubbles, Filanovsky