Seattle Bindery Newsletter: Issue #22. We welcome your comments.

1. E-commerce re-emergings: Our online colleagues are getting a second wind after having it knocked out of ‘em earlier this year. The indefatigable printCafe was honored by Mayor Willie Brown during Seybold week in San Francisco with its own “day,” August 29th. The company also announced signing a deal with PMP Communications, Australia’s largest commercial printer. Collabria is back in the news, announcing an alliance with Quark to incorporate Quark’s Digital Media System which enables users to manage unlimited numbers of text and graphics files via Collabria’s e-commerce platform. Collabria also reports winning the 2000 GATF InterTech Technology Award for its eCatalog product. Impresse announced that Autodesk will be using its e-commerce service to produce a range of marketing materials, including collateral, product manuals and packaging, direct mail, etc.

2. Cool designs: It’s always fun to get a job in the shop that pushes the envelope, design- and production-wise. We just finished up an interesting project that involved a piece designed to fit the size of a CD for 60,000 software licensing brochures. The eight-page piece was folded and saddle-stitched, then diecut and punched in a single action.

3. E-pubs and copyrights: To protect against Napster-like file sharing, New York University and other schools are introducing electronic textbooks on DVD that can only be rented, not purchased, according to an item in the 9/11 WSJ. The pay-per-read concept has obvious benefits to authors and publishers, who get recurring fees as the books are updated. The digital rights management, or DRM, technology used in these textbooks can also be applied to the Internet, making it a hot prospect for creators of music and movies, as well as books.

4. A reminder that Seattle Bindery recently acquired a 41” x 29” Johannisberg diecutter, which enables us to diecut and score even your largest press sheets. Our letterpress operation also houses platen and cylinder presses in a range of other sizes, including 20” x 26”, 25” x 35”, 20” x 27.5” and 18” x 23”. In other words, we can handle virtually any size diecutting and scoring job.

5. Joining forces: From news maven, IAPHC President Kevin Keane, we learned that 16 e-commerce firms, including Collabria, Impresse, MediaFlex, Noosh and WAM!NET, have formed the PrintTalk community to define “best practices and to develop common and open communication interfaces between their products . . . and to implement a common Job Definition Format.” This could be good news for both buyers and printers


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