Talking about how the publishers control the printing quality of books

As we all know, the book quality includes the content quality of the book, the design quality of the binding and the quality of the printing. With the improvement of people’s living standards, people’s purchases of books are not just about good or bad content, but books are not beautiful, that is, the design and printing quality of books (for convenience, we call it simply the quality of printing). Become a very important standard for measuring the quality of books. The high-quality design and printing level can attract people's attention and enhance their trust in the contents of the books. It will eventually become a decisive factor in buying behavior.

The quality of book printing is also an indispensable factor in evaluating book quality. Content and form (appearance) are two major elements of the book. The printing of books belongs to the appearance of books. A good appearance can better express the content and promote the expression of the content. On the contrary, the bad appearance cannot express the content well, and it will have a negative impact on the content.

So, who guarantees the quality of the book? As the formation of books is divided into two phases, the previous stage belongs to the design and preparation stage of the books, works in the publishing house, the latter stage belongs to the production stage of the books, and the work is in the printing enterprise. Therefore, everyone generally takes it for granted that: Responsible for the content quality, editing quality and design quality of the book; the printing factory is responsible for the printing and binding quality of books.

In the era of movable type printing, after the manuscript of the publishing house was released, the remaining publishing tasks were handed to the printing factory. The printing house was responsible for the work of checking characters, typing, proofreading, making plates, printing, and so on. The quality of printing was basically the same as that of publishing houses. Nothing to do. Nowadays, the prepress production stage of books is basically realized through computer typesetting software, binding design software, and laser photocopying system. Most publishing houses are equipped with relatively complete electronic publishing systems.

As prepress production brings texts and images into the entire printing workflow, its position in the entire printing process is extremely important, so the publisher has an unshirkable responsibility for the quality of the books. In addition, the work of publishers in many other aspects will also exert different degrees of influence on the printing quality of books. Therefore, the quality of book printing is no longer a matter for printing companies themselves. Improving the quality of book printing has become a publishing house and printing company. Must common goals.

This article intends to analyze the many factors affecting the quality of book printing from the point of view of the publishing house's management of book production, and provides work ideas for presses to improve the quality of printing.

First of all, talk about the pre-press production stage.

Prepress production refers to the process of processing an original into a printing plate that can be printed and reproduced according to the overall design requirements of the book. The prepress process includes document verification, text input, graphic editing, graphic output, plate production, and proofing. When checking the originals of scientific and technical books, the quality of the illustrations (including color pictures, black-and-white images, line drawings, etc.) should be inspected. Color and black and white image artwork must have clear images and strong sense of hierarchy. The color should be bright; the lines of the line drawing should be clear and full; the resolution must meet the publishing requirements, and the line number must be above 300 l. As most of the drafts submitted by the author to the publishing house are currently in the form of hard copy, some of the drawings are handled by them. If the illustrations do not meet the basic requirements, the publishing house shall promptly notify the author to provide a better plan or remake. For the color pictures provided by the author, often using professional drawing software such as Adobe's Photoshop software, the morphological transformation, color transformation, layer correction, image modification, special effects design, screening and other processing methods. Many of the line drawings in the manuscript are scanned by the author from other materials or books. Such pictures are generally redrawn with the corresponding graphics processing software (such as Freehand, CorelDRAW, etc.). If the picture is saved, it will not meet the requirements. The illustrations are brought to the printing stage and are bound to affect the printing quality.

Followed by the determination of the printing process. Publishers should work with printing companies to choose reasonable printing processes to achieve the best printing effect. Book printing generally uses lithographic printing, and the inner core printing (monochrome) generally has no special requirements in the process. For the binding production, the publishing house often uses some special processes, such as coating (light film, matte film), UV coating. , embossing, special printing, etc. The use of these special processes has its own specific objects and conditions. These factors must be taken into consideration when designing the frames. If they are not properly selected, they will not achieve the desired effect, although they will increase the cost of printing.

Again, the choice of printed materials. The materials printed by the book mainly refer to ink and paper. Publishers generally pay less attention to printing inks, and they pay more attention to the papers that affect the cost of printing. With the same printing press, using different grades of quality paper, the printing quality is very different. Therefore, the publishing house should select different printing materials according to the different requirements of the book. The key books and boutique books can be considered for selecting high-grade paper and specialty paper, and ordinary books are selected for plain paper.

Finally, talk about the press's supervision and management of the book printing process. You can take the following measures:

1. When selecting fixed-point printing companies, conduct a detailed inspection of their qualifications, printing equipment, personnel quality, and management level, and regularly and irregularly analyze and compare the printing quality of the printed books printed by all the fixed-point printing companies. Those who are high should be given encouragement and praise, and even raised their printing prices; they should be reminded and warned of the low quality of printing and often have problems, reduce their printing prices, and even stop their cooperation.

Second, often go deep into the printing company's workshop, check the printed books, so that we can not only understand the progress of the decals and books, but also find quality problems in time, so that we can take measures as soon as possible to improve and remedy.

Third, adhere to the sample book review system before the book batch binding. The "Book Quality Assurance System" clearly stipulates: "The printing factory must first staple 10 copies of the sample book and send it to the publishing house for inspection before the front cover of each book has been printed and the contents have not been bound in batches." Persons can review the quality of books before they have been copied in large numbers, identify problems and correct them in time to avoid unnecessary losses.

4. Sampling a large quantity of printed books submitted by the printing factory. In addition to checking the sample books sent by the printing house, it is also necessary to conduct sampling inspections on large quantities of books based on the number of decals and printed books. For unqualified books, they will not be signed for storage. Because sample books are generally carefully selected by the printing house, if the publishing department only examines sample books and does not conduct spot checks on large quantities of books, it is very likely that unqualified books will flow into the library.

In summary, under the conditions of market economy, publishers have a greater responsibility for improving the quality of book printing, and should be the main body of book printing quality management. Therefore, in addition to the prepress production of books, It is necessary to strictly manage the books printed by printing companies. In order to solve the problem and communicate with each other, take responsibility for each other, work in close cooperation, and work together to improve the quality of the book's printing and installation, and provide readers with excellent and unified books and contents.

Reprinted from: "Guangdong printing" Author: Ren Xiang (Author: Wuhan University Press)