“there’s now a solution for systematically avoiding book overproduction”

Lisa-Marie Drosihn, let’s start with the obvious: why does every private individual today order their family chronicle online without batting an eyelid and have it printed, while publishers with their professional needs apparently still hesitate?

Lisa-Marie Drosihn: Smaller and mid-sized publishers are actually already ordering online – including in multiple tranches and in shorter runs. We offer the full product portfolio that a conventional print shop does, but we enable calculating and ordering everything online. What I observe is that larger publishers simply lack the trust – the conviction that an online shop can reliably handle the entire process end to end: from ordering through delivery to providing complimentary copies.

That sounds paradoxical. The same buyers who order their business cards and commercial print without a second thought from an online print portal don’t trust the same route for book print runs?

Lisa-Marie Drosihn: That exact contradiction is what’s striking. But we’re seeing a shift. More and more publishers are signing up and placing their first orders – driven in part by cost pressure. If you can order books online through full automation and incur no warehousing costs in the process, that’s attractive for everyone involved.

Print on demand has a reputation for being expensive. Unit costs are higher. But publishers are notoriously price-sensitive. The drive for the lowest possible unit costs at high print runs is historically deeply ingrained. How does an online shop address that expectation?

Lisa-Marie Drosihn: Our clients ask that question a lot, actually. Digital print has advanced considerably over recent years: the old cost curve – where high run lengths paid off disproportionately – has flattened out significantly. Quality and cost-efficiency can be combined very well at shorter runs today.

Can you still tell from the finished product whether it was printed digitally?

Lisa-Marie Drosihn: No. Not with any of the human senses.

And what about post-press finishing – covers, special finishes?

Tobias Kaase: We have a very broad offering there. Hardcover, softcover, PUR, hot-melt, dispersion binding, thread-sewn binding, square spine, round spine, laminations, countless paper types and grammages – all familiar in the publishing world. We even offer coloured page edges online. So we’ve integrated pretty much everything, including processing via interface – fully API-compatible. Embossing is still a work in progress, but we’re on it. All in all, we cover well over ninety percent of what’s in demand. Specialist options like exposed-spine thread-sewn binding are already available – that’s genuinely high-end territory.

An online shop has a structural weakness that no algorithm simply fixes: a good field sales rep shows clients possibilities they wouldn’t have thought of themselves. How do you address that?

Lisa-Marie Drosihn: That’s true. In an online shop, clients can initially only discover what we actively offer and communicate – via newsletter, social media and similar channels. But in the medium term I also see AI-driven solutions there: language models that guide a book configuration, inform about new options and simplify the ordering process.

Tobias Kaase: Alongside that, our traditional field sales team still exists – and will continue to exist. But the question is one of economics: for a run of ten copies, personal account management isn’t financially viable. So both channels eventually have to and will complement each other. We direct clients specifically to wherever they’re better served.

You mentioned coopetition – that is, collaboration between competitors. In the printing sector, this already seems to be common practice. Why hasn’t the publishing industry quite caught up yet?

Tobias Kaase: I meant something very concrete by it: that when certain trigger events occur – a machine breakdown, a wave of illness – I temporarily use a competitor’s resources and grant them the same in return. In the print industry, that’s normal. We regularly help other print shops and we receive help in return. The principle has proved absolutely robust for us. In the summer of 2025, an extreme weather event caused a roof collapse in production at our Paderborn site. At that moment, the question of whether we had reliable partners stopped being theoretical. We did – partly within our own corporate group, partly with competitors with whom we’ve built a genuine relationship of trust over time. The overriding advantage is delivery capability, made possible by the redundancies in production capacity we’ve created across company boundaries. The consequence is massive supply chain security.

Why hasn’t this idea caught on with publishers in the same way?

Tobias Kaase: Publishers define themselves by their content. And content is harder to compare directly than printing and finishing machinery. In the print industry, competition is clear-cut: two offset print shops that both produce books are obvious competitors. In publishing, by contrast, the concept of a competitor is more abstract. Content and editorial positioning aren’t always directly comparable – certainly not cleanly separable. Maybe that’s also why a publisher can’t quite work out who in their competitive environment is suitable for “coopetition,” or whether it makes sense at all.

In our industry, the structural situation is different: machines are so expensive that you can’t just line up five of them side by side to be on the safe side. Nobody can afford that. So it makes sense to build these necessary redundancies virtually – alongside your own sites – even in a competitive environment. And publishers don’t necessarily have that time-critical component either. If a member of the editorial team is out for a week, that doesn’t mean the book doesn’t come out. At worst, it’s published a bit later. For us, at the absolute end of the production process, it’s binary: machine down, job can’t be produced, job is gone. Zero or one. That simply creates the necessity to always be mentally flexible and willing to compromise.

Dominik Haacke: I see this a little differently on the publishing side. Within the Börsenverein (German Publishers and Booksellers Association), the special interest groups and task forces on key topics work very well. Operational collaboration is certainly there – and of a high quality. What may be missing is the commitment at C-suite level. Publishers themselves tend to be more cautious there.

Tobias Kaase: That’s right. Events like the Online Print Summit are living proofs for our industry that cooperation between competitors is not only possible but productive. We’re not just discussing presentations together here, but specifically how we do business with one another. Everyone has their own speciality and it makes sense to focus on the areas of expertise that you yourself have fully mastered. For us, that’s the production of books and brochures. However, we also offer banners and business cards in our shop – sourced from specialist partners, connected via an interface. Behind the scenes, there are twenty or thirty partners involved. The customer experiences a one-stop shop. That’s the idea.

On the topic of sustainability. There are signs that some publishers are quietly backing away from sustainability communications – out of fear of cease-and-desist letters following the transposition of the EU Green Claims Directive into the German Act Against Unfair Competition (UWG). What are you observing?

Dominik Haacke: It’s a real phenomenon. The directive on combating misleading environmental claims – commonly referred to in English as the Green Claims Directive, transposed in Germany into the Act Against Unfair Competition and taking effect in September – creates a situation where anyone – competitors, NGOs, private individuals – can take action against false or unsubstantiated environmental claims. That’s unsettling people. Some publishers are now responding by removing even legitimate certifications like the FSC logo. I think that’s a fundamental mistake.

Tobias Kaase: The FSC label stands for decades of sustainable forestry, third-party certified. It’s the very opposite of greenwashing.

Dominik Haacke: Exactly. I saw a product in a bookshop that essentially claimed to be sustainable because CO₂ had been saved in transport, as the book was produced in Latvia. That’s the kind of communication that can fall under the new rules – not an FSC logo. Anyone who conflates the two right now is doing themselves a disservice.

Who actually bears the main burden of certification work in this system?

Dominik Haacke: The print shops. Last year alone we had thirteen external audits – ISO 14001, ISO 9001, ISO 50001, ISO 45001, EcoVadis, FSC, PEFC and more. That’s a considerable effort we carry as producers. That this very foundation is now being called into question is hard to fathom.

Tobias Kaase: On top of that, there is the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), which, although it was ultimately suspended for books and printed materials – on the grounds of ‘cultural heritage’ and freedom of expression – had left us in the printing industry facing considerable planning uncertainty for months on end. Not every EU initiative is bad; on the contrary: standards such as the USB-C standardisation show that European regulation can create real added value. But the EUDR was an example of how ill-conceived legislation can affect an entire supply chain – and had to be halted two weeks before it was due to come into force because the technical feasibility simply did not exist.

What’s the takeaway message for the publishing industry?

Tobias Kaase: I worked on the publisher side myself for years. Today, with both perspectives, I can say: the pace of transformation in the print industry is genuinely massive. And I believe the European print and paper industry is doing remarkable – and in some respects truly foundational – work on sustainability, to make the sustainability agenda of our publisher and industry clients actually function. Dominik just mentioned it. We’re investing with entrepreneurial risk in our people and in new production equipment to create an attractive technical offering for demand-driven book production.

There’s now a solution for systematically avoiding book overproduction while simultaneously obtaining machine-readable data on material usage across the entire supply chain. Unlike many other industries, we’re already in the late stages of a major transformation. The online print industry is demonstrating – in the most practical terms – what’s possible today.