The PrintWeek Awards kick off on 2 September as Jury Week begins

Day 1 of PrintWeek Awards 2024 Jury Week was organised on 2 September for the examination of seven categories. Book Printer of the Year (Education), Book Printer of the Year (Specialty and Trade), Book Printer of the Year (Print on Demand — POD), Brochure and Catalogue Printer of the Year, Fine Art Printer of the Year, Newspaper Printer of the Year, and POS/POP Printer of the Year.

145 samples across these categories from around 40 companies nationwide were laid out for the Jury members to look at. The jury featured seven members — Rajnish Shirsat, Mukund Moghe, Ritesh Uttamchandani, Bhushan Kolte, Ganesh Kanate, Kiran Bhat, and Dibyajyoti Sarma.

When asked what books meant to him, Shirsat said, “Sometimes I feel like blood doesn’t run in my body, it’s probably ink. I’ve spent 30 years in this industry. I always look forward to Jury day, it’s like a pilgrimage for me. I have seen the entire industry evolve right from the days when there was no Internet. Small runs, then digital came in, PDFs. We felt like print would die. Nothing happened. Print is still thriving, and why not? The joy of holding a book in hand, the smell of paper, caressing the pages. A Kindle might hold thousands of titles, but when I carry a book, it makes a completely different impression.”

In the coming years, Moghe says that the print industry has to become a solution provider and not a problem creator. He said, “Books shouldn’t just be books. They should also be utility items.” He said that the samples he saw on Day One fit that maxim.

Ritesh Uttamchandani said, “I am personally averse to overproduced, loud books. People tend to showcase that as their best work. The production wasn’t screaming at me. Printing and all of those things are 20–30% of the work. It’s the finishing, the cutting, the binding that matters. The ones that I really liked were able to minimise the margin of error. That is also because it is a mix of machine and manual processes.”

Dibyajyoti Sarma is a publisher at Red River, an independent poetry publishing venture. He said, “There are more players in book printing, and not just in the metro cities, but elsewhere too. Also, printers today are more conscious about the finishing and enhancements of the book, not just the printing. Earlier, printers would invest more in the printing machine and less in finishing. Now, printers are investing more in post-press, and everything is inline.” 

Sarma also noted that this year there were a large number of samples in the fine art and coffee table book categories. He said, “It feels like this particular segment is doing really well.” Another trend that he observed was that Indian book printers are now supplying books to markets all over the world. He said, “A large number of the samples received were produced for foreign markets.”