How Books Are Made - Plates, paper, perfecting—print! – with Mike Jason

Plates, paper, perfecting—print! – with Mike Jason

11/09/20 • 34 min

Even in our digital world, despite the insight of editors and the wonders of design, printing is really where the book-making magic culminates. In this episode, Arthur speaks to Mike Jason, a long-time book-printing expert.

Mike Jason is the director of Academic Press, which prints books for educational publishers across southern Africa.

He takes us through the book-printing process, and discusses the differences between offset and digital printing, where book paper comes from, and the economics of book printing. And he and Arthur revisit a magnificent art-book project from twenty years ago.

Mike Jason is the director of Academic Press, which prints books for educational publishers across southern Africa.

Previous Episode

Measuring reading for smart marketing – with Andrew Rhomberg

Arthur speaks to Andrew Rhomberg, the founder of Jellybooks, about how publishers use smart ebooks to measure what readers think of a new publication, and to figure out whether it could be a bestseller.

It is one of the marvellously crazy things about publishing that most books are published long before you have any idea whether they’ll be popular. Publishers will spend small fortunes on advances, editing, design, digitization, printing, and marketing before knowing whether a book will sell more than a few hundred copies. Perhaps early reader data can help solve that problem – something Andrew and his team have been working on for ten years.

Andrew has a broad, global perspective, coming to publishing from chemistry, telecoms, and music, and having lived and worked in Denmark, Austria, Italy, the USA, the Netherlands, Russia, and the UK.

Links from the show:

Next Episode

Publishers, libraries, sales, and community – with Guy LeCharles Gonzalez

We all love libraries, but maybe we could love them a little more. Some money-minded publishing folk even wonder: what effect do libraries have on book sales? Luckily, Guy LeCharles Gonzalez can help answer that question, and many others.

Guy is Chief Content Officer at LibraryPass, and till recently ran the Panorama Project, which measures the impact that public libraries have on reading and on book sales. Before that, he worked in a range of senior publishing and marketing roles, and ran a wonderful book-making conference called Digital Book World. He has a sharp eye for lazy thinking, and that rare ability to grasp both the big picture and the tiny details that make it up.

Links from the show: