COPY CATS: CANON WILL CO-MARKET NEWSPAPERDIRECT PRODUCT

Chicago. At last week's big commercial printing industry show, Print '05, virtually the only newspaper publisher present was, well, sort of a virtual newspaper publisher.

NewspaperDirect Inc. was on the floor at the Canon U.S.A. Inc. booth to pitch itself as one of the newest members of the copier company's Imaging Systems Group Alliance and Industry Marketing Program.

This week, Canon and NewspaperDirect officially kick off the agreement to co-market the NDPrintstation newspaper printing system, which digitally capture newspapers from around the world for on-demand printing, through Canon's extensive marketing network. Getting on board with Canon, the U.S. brand leader with some 35% of copier market share, is a big coup for the Vancouver, B.C.-based NewspaperDirect, which specializes in the digital delivery and local printing of same-day American and international newspapers.

"We think it's a marketing natural," NewspaperDirect's vice president of sales and marketing, Richard K. Miller, said on the Print 05 show floor. Canon, he notes, has 5,500 sales reps.

NewspaperDirect is the first content provider to join the Canon alliance, Miller said.

For Canon, the agreement focuses attention on its imageRUNNER MFP multifunction copiers. "By utilizing NewspaperDirect's ND PrintStation print-on-demand solution, Canon imageRUNNER MFP devices make possible convenient, 'on-demand' delivery of valuable news resources for corporations, as well as other environments with limited access to paper subscriptions," Canon's senior manager for the marketing alliance, Greg Ryan, said in a statement. "This flexible and unique solution represents a powerful and efficient information management and distribution system for Canon imageRUNNER device customers."

To become a "Canon Compatible" third-party solution under the copier alliances criteria, the ND Printstation was successfully tested in conjunction with the Canon imageRUNNER C6800 MFP and the imagePASS D1 server, according to NewspaperDirect. The test, run by VeriTest, has been published online at www.veritest.com/canon.

NewspaperDirect offers on-demand printing of more than 270 newspapers, including more than 30 U.S. papers. Among the offerings are Le Monde in France, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Germany, the Jerusalem Post, Kommersant in Russia, Mainichi Shimbun in Japan, and the U.S. newspapers Chicago Tribune, New York Times, and San Jose Mercury News.

The company recently signed an agreement to produce the privately branded e-paper version of The Daily Telegraph in London known as Telegraph Screenprint. The online version combines the look and feel of the traditional printed edition with digital features such as article linking and instant translation into 11 languages.