Inkjet & Digital Printing
Canon Future Book Forum: Sustainability in book printing
Monday 15. November 2021 - Sustainability is also becoming increasingly important in the book industry. The Canon Future Book Forum on 2 December aims to showcase and drive sustainable innovation in all areas of the book industry.
Canon’s Future Book Forum is a long-established industry event: for printers, publishers and book distributors. Last year, for the first time purely virtual due to the pandemic, the event was very well received with almost 1,000 participants from over 65 countries. The programme, packed with practical advice on how companies can survive and innovate in a pandemic, generated a lot of positive feedback afterwards. The Future Book Forum 2021, now in its ninth year, will again be held in a virtual format and will focus on sustainability.
World-renowned author and speaker Peter Fisk will once again headline this year’s event, joining experts from the fields of sustainability, innovation and publishing to discuss the opportunities that sustainability presents for businesses.
Jessica Lobo, Global Goals Programme Manager at the UN Global Compact Network UK, will deliver the keynote presentation on “Why does sustainable innovation matter?” and outline how the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide the foundation for developing sustainable growth.
Andy Hunter, CEO and founder of Bookshop.org, will present his vision that books remain an important part of our culture in the digital age. He will also provide insights into the business model of bookshop.org, a socially oriented platform that helps independent bookshops increase their share of the e-commerce sales channel for books. The audience can be inspired by the company’s initiative, which has been described as a “revolutionary moment in the history of bookselling”.
Marko Silventoinen, Managing Director, and Pekka Kuurne, Development Manager at Otava Group, a diversified Finnish media company active in book and magazine publishing, retail, book printing and online services, will talk about their vision for a more sustainable and commercially viable book supply chain. In particular, they talk about how the company is implementing an efficient data-driven supply chain for printed books within the group, based on the interaction of data and innovative digital print workflows.
Canon Ideas Competition 2021
In line with the theme of this year’s Future Book Forum, Canon launched a competition on the HYVE Crowd platform in September to gather innovative ideas for making printed books more sustainable. The competition was open to everyone inside and outside the book industry. The criteria for the ideas were practicality, innovativeness, connection to printed books and the publishing business, and the extent to which the idea addresses one or more of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. The selected finalists of the ideas competition will present their ideas live at the Future Book Forum to the audience and a panel of experts including Andy Hunter, Jessica Lobo and Dalia Ibrahim, CEO of Nahdet Mis Publishing House and founder of EdVentures, the first corporate venture capital in the Middle East specialising in education technology. Everyone in the audience will have the opportunity to participate in the innovation process by voting for their favourite idea.
Speaking about this year’s Future Book Forum, Peter Wolff, Senior Vice President of Production Printing Products, Canon EMEA, said, “As Canon’s corporate philosophy is Kyosei – Living and Working Together for the Common Good – this year’s Future Book Forum theme of sustainable innovation is particularly close to my heart. As a company, we contribute to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals through various business activities, but we also see that our technology, products and services offer unique opportunities for the book industry to make its sustainability goals a reality. I look forward to seeing how this year’s Future Book Forum and our 2021 Canon Idea Challenge will be an example of helping the industry find new ideas for a more sustainable business. “
The Canon Future Book Forum is aimed at:
– Book publishers
– Book printers
– distributors
– journalists
– Publishers and printers associations
– Technology providers / start-ups
– Influencers and opinion leaders from organisations, forums, media