A 100-year-old press moves with the times

The MWN Press in Chennai’s busy Royapettah area, on Lloyds Road, has just completed 100 years. It was in 1910 that N.R.K Tatachari, a lawyer practising lawyer in the Madras High Court, launched the Madras Weekly Notes (MWN), a legal journal. A press was then set up to print the journal and it thus came to be called MWN Press. Tatachari soon took up jobbing work and produced the LIFCO dictionary (a sort of Bible for students in Tamil Nadu in those years), Sanskrit publications of the Sri Ramakrishna Mission, as well as publications of Orient Longman.

NT Ramanujam continued the good work started by his father, Tatachari, and managed MWN Press during the letterpress days. Under NR Srivas, Ramanujam’s younger son, MWN welcomed the offset press. Srinivas had studied printing technology from the School of Printing and it was he who really improved the equipment and set the tone for adopting a quality culture in the organisation.

A single-colour offset machine was purchased in 1984 and MWN quickly established a name as a quality single-colour printer. A second-hand, imported, reconditioned, 5-colour manroland arrived in 1995. Sadly, Srivas’s bright spark did not last long – he died in a road accident in 1998. This led to his elder brother, NR Kumar, a management consultant, stepping in.

It has indeed been a long journey for a press that started on a one-ground property – a dilapidated house with a courtyard. If the cramped space has been suffocating to a degree, business has not been smooth over the years. For example, in the 1990s, when pre-gummed labels for Hindustan Lever formed a major chunk of the business, Levers suddenly slashed volumes and prices because the MNC was going through a problem. It affected MWN Press quite badly, but Kumar says it was in retrospect one of the best things to have happened. It questioned the company’s survival and Kumar and his team knew that if they did not completely transform their style of operation, they would be in deep trouble.

And so, the focus shifted to controlling wastage and adopting a constant quest-for-quality culture in the form of Kaizen. To show that he meant business, Kumar ‘let go’ of four senior staff. That sent the message to the rest of the staff. In 2002, Kumar bought the Mitsubishi Diamond 1000 5-colour press.

Today, MWN Press is all set to shift completely to a new facility, an energy-efficient building, on 12-ground premises in Mangadu. The process has already begun. Paperwork has been reduced and accounting operations have been speeded up, with supplier payments being made by electronic transfer and staff salaries being credited directly to bank accounts. The present office may be serve as a marketing hub.

In six months, MWN Press is likely to add another 5-colour machine, complete with coater and extended delivery. Will it be another Mitsubishi? Kumar hasn’t decided yet, but he says technology has hit a plateau and he sees no difference between the Mitsubishi Diamond and V series. He doesn’t mind taking a look at reconditioned European machines. One thing he is certain about though, is that the new addition will double volumes for MWN Press.

Sashi Nair

Community for Governance of Intellectual Property

Copyright owners launch forum for protection of digital rights

There are many areas of our working and professional lives that need solutions that are sometimes bigger than us as individuals or even the organisations that we work for. For instance the issues of colour quality standardisation or environment guidelines for printers. As most of our readers know, these and many other serious issues have not yet been addressed in any serious way by the local and national printers associations. Nor have they been dealt with any of manufacturers associations as a group – be it the ink manufacturers association, the paper makers, or even the equipment and consumable manufacturing associations.

Don’t feel bad about this. The rest of the society with the exception of Nasscom and Mait (both deal with information technology) is also sitting on top of growth with abundant chaos. We are all so busy either surviving or making money, building new plants, buying new presses and attending exhibitions that we really have no time for all that stuff. Let the government do it and let those who are pleased to be part of government committees do what they can. May be they will call us as experts and even give us a free trip to forren.

The issue of copyright and intellectual property is based on the idea that people need to be compensated for their work even if that work consists of an idea, or producing a photograph, or a packaging design, or a machine design, or a type font, or a story or book. Software, music, videos and films are also intellectual property – creative and professionally processed work that according to the current state of civilisation and the Indian constitution need to be paid for.

The issues are complex and the associations who are nominally supposed to be active on this front particularly with regard to authors, publishers, and printers rights and obligations in the area of what could be called ‘content’ are not particularly accessible, active or transparent. This is why yet another organisation is emerging – the Community for Governance of Intellectual Property.

At its first half-day meeting on 6 December 2010 at the IIC in Delhi there were 35 plus authors, publishers, printers and lawyers who discussed a host of things that need to be discussed and to get done – either by discussion and agreement, alerting the government, or by taking action in the broader interest as was done last year in the filing of an Indian authors and publishers point of view in the New York Court that is hearing the case against Google by the Authors Guild of America.

There were many good ideas – too many to discuss properly in just half a day. And those present were an assortment of extremely knowledgeable and forthright intellectual and professionals.

On 6 January 2011, the first follow-up meeting of the CGIP was held. It was jointly organised by the CGIP and our own Ipp Services, Training and Research Pvt Ltd. IppStar as it is known, felt the need to support this meeting with the help of the Delhi Master Printers Welfare Association because the printers need to contribute something positive to the publishing, software and content society of which they are a part. And the copyright issue is one that they face everyday since they have to be sure that their customer is actually bringing them an something for which he has the legal right to print. Printers are equally liable for counterfeiting and piracy under the law, as the publisher is. In addition, we everyday use copyrighted software and fonts – these are the tools of our trade.

The meeting on 6 January 2011 although it brought together printers, packaging desingers, software developers, authors, journalists, publishers and booksellers on a common platform once again, was not as exciting or well-attended as the first meeting. Nevertheless it was an interesting and mostly focussed discussion of the issues of publishing, software and piracy. Moreover, the CGIP will continue to hold such meetings on or around the 12^th of every month in Delhi. It will continue to address these important and complex issues issues with seriousness and transparency. Further details are available on http://www.cgip.org.

Of China scoring in commercial printing … and the plight of Indian writers

From rotary printing presses (used in rotogravure, offset and flexography) to screen-printing, and now, to digital and web-based printing, commercial printing has come a long way and perhaps become just a little too complicated for a beginner trying to understand how the business works. While the gravure method is not much in India these use these days except for flexible packaging (because it runs on cylinders that are pretty expensive), according to Raju Seshadrinathan, Executive Director, Nagaraj & Co., a leading printer in Chennai, it’s digital printing that has gained considerable ground in recent years.

Although the cost per page is considerably higher than offset printing, digital printing is far less cumbersome. However, it is said to be suitable only for small volumes of print requirement. Seshadrinathan says that offset printing still rules in India as far as commercial printing work (annual reports, brochures, leaflets, danglers and point-of-sale material) and book printing are concerned.

While mentioning that commercial printers in Chennai and several other places are an unhappy lot, thanks to volumes having dipped and margins having reduced drastically, Seshadrinathan makes another interesting point – that the recession in the United States and Europe has indeed affected printing volumes in Chennai. China seems to have taken over the volume business from Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai, he says, adding that the sheer speed with which the Chinese printers execute deliveries is “simply amazing.” He feels the Chinese Government is providing the print industry there with a lot of subsidy in terms of logistics, and shipping among other areas. “By and large, they have a stable currency. The only problem is language, and they have middlemen for that,” says Seshadrinathan.

Back to the Indian scene, and Seshadrinathan says sale of children’s books is picking up but writers, especially small authors (across the spectrum), are having a big problem with publishing houses. Reason: they may have to wait two years to get money! So, not many people set about writing a book although they may have a book in them. Seshadrinathan gives a simple example of how a book is priced in the market in Chennai. If the printing cost of a book is Rs 150, the price is suitably hiked so that 15 per cent goes to the author, 40 per cent to the publisher, and 60 percent to the seller. The customer thus ends up paying upwards of Rs 320 for the book. Books, fiction or otherwise, do not really sell in large numbers in India. An author is happy if his or her work has sold 2000-odd copies. Not everybody is a Khushwant Singh or Shobhaa De to touch the 25,000 mark, a number that is far, far below what an international author would expect to sell. That, of course, is another story.

The other aspect is also about writers in India generally not having a clue whom to approach and how to get their work published. Only if you know somebody who knows somebody else who matters in the publishing industry, does a project at least get a boost. Seeking a meeting with a publisher is sometimes almost like making a visit to the police station.

Sashi Nair