[2684] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
"Electropress", digital printing press used by McGraw-Hill / Primis
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Edward Vielmetti)
Tue Apr 14 16:15:01 1992
To: com-priv@uu.psi.com
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 92 16:10:23 -0400
From: Edward Vielmetti <emv@msen.com>
The 14 April 1992 _Wall Street Journal_ reports that AM International,
R.R. Donnelly, and McGraw-Hill have announced "Electrobook Press", a
350 feet/minute printing press that doesn't require the costly and time
consuming setup that traditional metal and plastic based plates that
textbook publishers have used.
It's notable to readers of com-priv since Brian Kahin's excellent
_Building Information Infrastructure_ collection is the first publication
of McGraw's new "Primis" imprint. Primis is geared to cut into the
coursepack market by offering academics an opportunity to produce
their own customized books, using materials they produced themselves
combined with McGraw's electronic database.
If the quality of the binding of these "Electrobooks" is up to the snuff of
the first issues from the press, organizations like Kinko's will have a
hard time keeping up; where your traditional stack of photocopies is
worthless after a single semester's use, a nicely bound custom text
is going to be a lot more attractive.
(Patrick Reilly wrote the article, quoting Joseph Dionne of McGraw-Hill
and George Cashau of the American Newspaper Publishers Association.)
