Paul Glasgow, operations director, Lightning Source Australia
On-demand books. Lightning Source Australia is seeing a huge growth in titles from almost every segment of the publishing industry, which mirrors our experience in the US and UK. The idea of being able to print one copy of a book is allowing many books to be made available for the Australian market that were previously hard to get or completely invisible. We are seeing strong growth in academic and university presses along with our perennial bestsellers in small trade presses and self-published titles. Many of these books are being printed in Australia for the first time.
Baden Kirgan, managing director, Blackhouse Comics
Comic books. In the 1990s boom, bestselling comics sold over one million copies a month in the US, but if sales for a comic hit 150,000 copies now, it would be an outrageous success. DC Comics has fought back by relaunching their comics. They’re retelling all the characters’ stories from the beginning – Superman, Batman – so everyone can jump on board without knowing 70 years of history. That’s been a huge success and Marvel is looking at similar ideas. But neither publisher would be surviving if they were just printing. Marvel just had the third highest grossing movie of all time (The Avengers) and that more than makes up for any losses arising from their print division.
Gary Chan, managing director, Photobook Australia
Photobooks. When we started five years ago, it was fairly slow, because it was a new concept, but now with the availability of more affordable digital cameras, it has become more popular. It’s replacing scrapbooking and traditional photo developing. We see people using them for different reasons, not just wedding albums, but also recipe books, graduation portfolios and holidays. There are improvements in printing technology. Now we’ve got HD printing. There’s only one machine from Canon that does HD printing. We see it going from standard to HD printing.
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