About printing books

Printing books is a major industry because of the variety of subject that books are written on. Authors publish their books through publishing houses or by self publishing. And magazines are also published on a regular basis. The printing industry is seeing a change now with the introduction of e-books and online material.

Printing books is a vast area and a fine art, although it is dealt with the hard metals and machines. William Caxton of England invented the first printing machine in the 13th century. After this primitive invention, the Germans invented faster and sophisticated machines after which the boost of publishing and printing started through out the world in large quantities. The invention of the modern machines of book printing goes to John Guttenberg in Germany. The German machines are used all over the world at present.

The books appear in different sizes as well as kinds. The common books are in A35 size and there are some exceptional books such as children's books, pictorial books, subject books and many more in the market of which are in the sizes as A3 and A4, and B4.

As much as the size, the color and the quality of the paper is important in book printing. The readers prefer to read pure white paper books rather than the recycled paper or yellowish newsprint paper. The paper is used suitably according to the nature of the book. The papers such as bank paper, news paper or polished white paper are used in the market. The polished white paper is used mostly in the printing of manuals, subject books, magazines and children's books to give an elegant appearance and attractive colors. Unlike the ancient books the present day-books possess different colors. The ancient books were mostly in black and white since the printing press was not well developed and the color mixing was in a primitive stage. There are two color, three color or four color books in the contemporary market. The modern color combination is six colors. The four color pictures are also common in the book printing field. This color combination is called CMYK which contains cayenne, magenta, yellow and black. The six color printing is very expensive and is used for important and expensive books such as geography, medicine and aircraft machinery manuals.

There are many new machines utilized in the printing industry, such as off-set and Duplo, Kode and SORD. These machines are well ahead to the machines used in the 20th century and has a high speed of production. The plates in the machines automatically do the color separation. There are inks specific to these necessary printing machines which are in high demand. In addition there are machines which could be fed with the colors as one color, two colors etc.

The ancient machines were very slow and it was a strenuous job for the printing workers. But today everything is under the supervision of the computers or the robots in the sophisticated printing presses in the developed countries.

Although the e-books are popular in the market, it is not for all the readers in the printing world. The e-books are easy to handle. Even with the latest electronic printing methods (software) appearing in the market, the printing word cannot be replaced.