Keeping the Words in Print: How CPI is Rewiring the Book for a Sustainable Age
When tablets, smartphones, and e-readers burst onto the scene, many expected this to be the beginning of the end for the printed book. The logic seemed inescapable: why cling to paper when pixels promised convenience, portability, and limitless choice? Yet two decades on, book printing has not only survived but flourished.
The revival owes much to technology of a different stripe: digital printing. Far from a relic, the printed book has been reinvented through advances in production, supply chain integration, and a renewed and impressive commitment to sustainability.
In this article - based on a FuturePrint podcast conversation with Lisa Faratro of CPI Group—we examine how CPI has become a driving force behind this transformation. Their approach, rooted in collaboration, highlights why book publishing today is not just resilient but a standard-bearer for sustainable print.
The printed book remains a compelling format. It is a singular object—tactile, durable, comforting and cognitively sticky—and, as it turns out, unexpectedly resilient in a distracted age. During the pandemic, when screen fatigue spread faster than any virus, books enjoyed a renaissance. Today publishers talk not only about replenishing paperbacks but about “beautiful books”: hardbacks with texture, foil, and flourish, bought as much for pleasure as for pride of place.
CPI Group is Europe’s largest book printer. This business has a long history. Its oldest constituent company dates to 1870—but its operating model is clearly not. CPI prints more than 400 million books a year across 14 sites in Britain, France, Germany, Spain and the Czech Republic. Much of that volume remains analogue, running on web presses purpose-built for books. But the strategic hinge is digital: a mesh of sheetfed and high-speed digital web presses, coupled to publishers’ inventory systems, that can produce a single copy on demand, replenish stock automatically and ship from warehouses overnight. In the United Kingdom and Germany, CPI has even planted presses inside distribution centres, shrinking the gap between click and copy.
But the industry is transformed. The story is not a romantic defence of hot metal. It is industrial choreography. The collapse of the Net Book Agreement two decades ago pushed British publishers to discount, then to slash inventory risk. Shorter runs and perpetual backlists followed—economically painful for litho alone, but tailor-made for digital. CPI’s answer was to partner early with the big press makers and to wire the factory to the market: “book of one” where needed; short runs when sensible; and, crucially, a network that repeats the act across continents, allowing the same title to be printed near its reader in the United States, South Africa or Asia. Less warehousing, less cash locked up in stock, fewer lorry-miles. Efficiency first; sustainability as a consequence.
Lisa Faratro, who leads environment and sustainability for CPI in Europe, came to the role the practical way—via production management, customer service and the awkward middle ground where compliance, operations and client demands collide. What began as a side-of-desk responsibility became a dedicated and necessary leadership role as regulators sharpened their teeth and customers insisted on proof, not promises. CPI has long carried ISO 14001 certification; now it is aligning to science-based targets, reporting through ESOS in the UK, and folding sustainability metrics into the same dashboards that govern budgets and throughput. Targets concentrate minds; public targets concentrate them more.
Publishing is a more complex business dynamic of buyer and seller compared with commercial printing for example. Each book has three influential “customers”: the author, the publisher and the reader. That triangle amplifies scrutiny. When CPI printed Greta Thunberg’s book, certification alone would not suffice; provenance, process and proof all mattered. The lesson, says Ms Faratro, is that sustainability in books must be achieved collaboratively or it will be merely a cosmetic marketing message. Printers, publishers and even competitors now sit together—in forums—to share data, define baselines and avoid resetting the same traps, alone, at great expense.
Collaboration is not altruism. It is important risk management in a market where legislation moves faster than capital budgets. The regulatory drift is clear: report not only what your energy audit says, but what you will do; publish the plan; return with results. Meanwhile, consumer expectations remain high and fast changing. Paper is praised as “natural” while plastic is demonised even when it is the material that best protects a book in transit and is readily recyclable in practice. The corrrect position is to choose the right material for the job, document the trade-offs, and keep improving. That is not a slogan; it is a sensible process.
Inside the factory, the same approach holds. Digital versus litho is not a moral choice—it is a system choice. Litho may be cheaper per copy at scale but demands longer runs and risks overproduction and unnecessary pulping. Digital carries higher unit costs but lower waste, instant setup and no obligation to print what will not sell. The optimal answer is dynamic: title by title, month by month. The more the data flows—orders from retailers, signals from warehouses, commitments from publishers—the smarter the presses can run. In effect, the industry is replacing buffer stock with information.
Sustainability also begins upstream, with readers. Publishing’s current worry is not so much the format wars as a generational one: a fall in young reading due to the proliferation of screens. Here, too, there is a systems angle. The book is increasingly understood as a counter-screen technology—reassuringly finite, neurologically focused, anxiety-reducing. If the industry wants readers tomorrow, it must put physical books into children’s homes today, and make those books desirable objects. The recent fashion for embellished hardbacks is not mere ornament; it is behavioural design.
All of which explains CPI’s enthusiasm for a cross-industry initiative—A Manifesto for More Sustainable Print—that aims to set a floor under practice and a common language for progress. The idea is less to parade virtue than to make good behaviour normal: minimum expectations, voluntary and non-binding, but public enough to invite accountability and flexible enough to respect competition law. In a sector that fragments into silos—books here, labels there, flooring somewhere else—the manifesto is a rare hand across the aisle. Print itself serves multiple industries, yet the principles remain the same.
Printing is manufacturing. It consumes materials and energy and creates waste. The way to make that reality better is not just the domain of the marketing department, but about engineering: smarter layouts and lighter papers (publishers have even adopted a typeface that reduces pagination); better recovery at end-of-life; more transparent data across the chain; and investment discipline that weighs carbon alongside cash. CPI’s internal governance is moving in that direction, treating sustainability targets as peers to financial ones rather than as corporate seasoning. The trick will be to keep momentum when the headlines move on.
It helps that the economic case and the environmental one often rhyme. Print-on-demand reduces both stock risk and scrap. Distributed manufacturing shortens lead times and supply chains while cutting transport emissions. Automation (CPI’s “no-touch” replenishment flows) takes cost out and error down. Even the aesthetics of the “beautiful book” can be optimised: use finishing where it adds value, not by habit. As Ms Faratro puts it, there is seldom a single right path, but there is almost always a better-informed one.
The book trade is sometimes thought of as quaint, and printing therefore as a craft from the past. Visit a modern book plant and the impression is very different: software scheduling, data-rich presses, algorithms whispering to warehouses. The old smell of ink and paper remains, but the economics are governed by information and responsiveness. CPI’s longevity lies in that blend—industrial reliability with a commitment to reinvention.
The larger lesson travels beyond books. Printing, in all its guises, is one of Britain’s and Europe’s least understood manufacturing sectors. It hides in plain sight: on wrapped buildings, decorated packaging, direct-to-shape industrial parts, functional coatings and the printed electronics stitched into supply chains. To outsiders it is something they touch every day yet do not understand. To those who run it, it is an enabling one—flexible, digital, increasingly clean—and more intertwined with advanced manufacturing than its detractors suppose.
The obituary of print can be retired, then, at least for books. The question is not whether print endures, but how intelligently it is made and moved. CPI’s wager is that transparency, shared baselines and a ruthlessly practical view of materials and methods will do more for the planet—and for publishers’ P&Ls—than slogans ever could. If the manifesto helps the sector keep score, so much the better. Sustainability, like literacy, improves with practice.
In my view, CPI’s story is an inspiring one, and further proof that with a willingness to adapt, collaborate and innovate, printing can thrive, even in a world of fast changing demands and volatility.
