SIC 2732 Book Printing
SIC 2732
This category includes establishments primarily engaged in printing or in printing and binding books and pamphlets, but not engaged in publishing. Establishments primarily engaged in publishing or in both publishing and printing books and pamphlets are classified in SIC 2731: Books: Publishing, or Publishing and Printing. Establishments engaged in both printing and binding books but primarily binding books printed elsewhere are classified in SIC 2789: Bookbinding and Related Work.
323117
Book Printing
The earliest printing techniques were developed in China in the second century A.D. The printing industry was inaugurated in the Western world when Johannes Gutenberg, Johann Fust, and Peter Schoffer invented movable type and the printing press around the middle of the fifteenth century, producing the first printed books in the Western world with this newly developed equipment. Printing came to the United States with some of the earliest English immigrants; the first book printed in the new world was the Bay Psalm Book, printed by Stephen Day in 1640. Since that time, design improvements and new inventions have made the process quicker and less costly. Almost from the beginning, printing and publishing were separate enterprises, and not much has changed since then: today, publishers decide what to print and how it will look, and printers put the words on the page to the publishers' specifications.
The book printing and book publishing industries are closely intertwined, however. In 2006, 3.1 billion books were sold in the United States, according to the Book Industry Study Group, reaching a value of $35.7 billion. The continued movement toward automation, computerization, and other new technologies spurred radical changes in the industry. Desktop typesetting and formatting at the point of origin (the author), digitized color scanning and imaging, electronic publishing over the World Wide Web, eBooks, and new media formats available for the conveyance of information constituted some of the driving forces of the industry.
Book printers generally are divided into two categories: long-run printers and short-run printers. For the largest book printers, such as R.R. Donnelley and Sons Co. and Quebecor World Inc., book printing was just one of several types of printing services they offered. Short-run printers, on the other hand, tended to specialize in book printing. They typically offer publishers both hard and soft-cover printing on editions of 500 to 15,000 copies.
Historically, books are separated into many different categories, such as trade; mass market paperbacks; textbooks; and scientific, technical, reference, and professional books. These have been marketed through traditional bookstores, super- or mega-bookstores, book clubs, and via direct-mail order and the World Wide Web.
The book printing industry is influenced by several factors: the publishing industry in general with its mass and specialized book marketing, the economy at large, and technological innovations, particularly those relating to increased quality or production.
The publication of books in the United States is characterized by a clear division of labor between book printer and book publisher. The publisher selects the books to be printed, makes all of the decisions regarding the appearance of the final product, from page layout and illustrations to type font and paper quality, and finances the production. The printer takes either a camera-ready copy or a film negative and reproduces it in the quantities required by the publisher on the paper specified, which is often already purchased by the publisher. The printer's role in the publishing process is one of reproduction rather than production.
Depending on whether the publisher supplies the camera-ready copy, a phototypeset film negative, or a computer text file, the printer's job begins either with making film negatives of each page or printing plates. In some cases, graphic artists working for the publisher take the corrected typeset hard copy of the text and lay out each page with any necessary graphics. These camera-ready pages, called mechanicals, are then sent on to the printer. The printer then photographs these mechanicals to produce the film copy necessary in the platemaking process. With recent advances in computer graphics capabilities, many computer systems can bypass both the layout process and the photographing process. Computer programs can combine text and graphics, so that page layout can be done on a computer rather than the drafting table. Hardware peripherals can generate output in the form of a film, ready for platemaking.
Metal, paper, or plastic plates are what actually place the images of the text onto the paper. Using photochemical processes, the image to be printed is transferred from the film negative onto the plate. The prepared plate has image areas that chemically accept ink, and can therefore pass the ink onto a piece of paper. Conversely, nonimage areas chemically repel ink and therefore pass nothing on to the paper, leaving spaces between the letters, images, and lines.
Having made the plates, the printer can begin the reproduction process. Most printing is offset. The inked plates pass a reverse image onto a rubber sheet, which then passes a positive image onto...
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