Executive Summary

Digital print-on-demand is a production process that lets you order manuals and brochures online in quantities you need at the moment, and have the output delivered directly to your end-users. This eliminates administrative cost and hassles, while saving time, space, materials and money.  It’s good for the environment, too.

 

Do you order manuals or brochures in long print runs, only to be confronted with the hassle of storing and distributing them?  Do you ever throw away expensive pre-prints because your needs, address or messages change?

How does this affect your time?  Your budget?  The environment?

 

How Digital Print-on-Demand Works

Imagine the on-demand production alternative.  Instead of pre-printing:

• Store materials in an online Document Library at your printer’s facility
• Update them easily by sending new files via a password-protected Customer Portal
• Print them only as needed, ordering anytime in any quantity on your Portal
• Maintain few or no pre-prints in physical storage
• Throw away nothing
• Produce materials in black & white or full color, flat, folded or bound into manuals
• Have orders delivered to your office, show,or  customers

 

Efficiencies of Digital Print-on-Demand Benefit You and the Environment, Too

Doesn’t this sound like a better way to do things?  Well it is.  Switching from long-run to digital print-on-demand can save you a lot of time and money.

It also has important environmental benefits.  Consider the question of whether it’s wise to de-emphasize printing in favor of electronic communications.

The idea behind this question is that sending PDFs over the Internet or printing information on CDs will save trees and thus be easier on the environment.

As we’ve discussed in other posts, if you want to preserve forests, make sure the nation’s tree farmers, who typically plant more trees than they harvest, have a market for their product.  Otherwise tree farms will be deforested as farmers convert properties to more profitable uses such as  agriculture, grazing or development.  Printing plants trees.

As we’ve also discussed, the Internet is a huge consumer of electricity, much of it from coal-powered plants.  Internet traffic has a gigantic ecological footprint of its own.  And it does nothing to promote management and enlargement of forests.

When we’re asked whether it’s environmentally sounder to use print or electronic communications, we recommend that your best approach is to always seek the most efficient process that suits your purpose, regardless of which medium you use.

When you think it’s best to print, on-line ordering and print-on-demand is a powerful way to gain efficiency.  Printing what you need when you need it removes the guesswork from the ordering process, so it conserves power and materials.

Waste not.  It’s better for your budget.  It’s better for the planet.

Around 31% of printed material goes obsolete and is thrown out, straining organizational budgets and creating huge waste.      CAPVentures, April 2003

For more information contact:

Sherry Mitchell

919-695-5676

sherry@laserimagenc.com