- Hi, my name is Max Siedentopf.
I work as a photographer, artist and director in London.
I'm very happy to present "Home Alone" the survival guide,
which is a book that was created during the lockdown.
I thought it was very important to show that
even if you're stuck at home,
it doesn't really mean you have to be stuck at home.
There are so loads of different things you can do
when you're home alone.
So I decided to post on social media every day,
a series of instructions, of all kinds of different things
you could do while you're stuck at home.
These instructions were then posted on social media
and photographed by myself and my followers,
and immediately sent back on the same day.
And that resulted in three weeks to over 100 instructions
and 1000 different photos that were created.
I thought that was really special
because it was such an incredible collaborative project
from so many different people all around the world
that I thought it just deserved
a little bit more than just being on social media.
I really wanted to turn the whole project into
a printed survival guide.
So I decided to contact my favorite artbook publisher
Hatje Cantz and presented the project.
And very, very soon after
we decided to turn the whole project into a book.
- When we received this proposal from Max for this book,
we all were very thrilled because it were really
at the core rise of the pandemic situation in Germany.
Of course our initial thoughts were about this threat
because artbooks needs some time to get into the market.
If we do it with offset printing and designers and artists
are very special clients in regards of quality.
And so we thought about using the book
as an initial moment under pandemic,
and to think about digital printing as it would have taken
us months to bring this to the public
with traditional offset printing.
Of course there are some benefits
from digital printing it's faster.
And we had a very good partner with Livonia printing,
we are used to do digital publishing
in the everyday life.
- Livonia printing is a print house located in Latvia.
Three years ago we made for ourselves the decision
that we have to go into the digital market.
The digital market is for our publishers,
that they can place orders as they like
no matter what kind of product they are ordering
and how it needs to look like.
Everything what we do in offsets we do also in digital.
In addition to these investments,
we also invested in the modern workflow systems
because we need to reduce our administrative work
to make something like that possible
because also small runs need to be cost-efficient,
with the Canon we found the right partner
in such a project that we can offer such a solution
which supported us with the physical printing machines,
like VarioPrint i300 to achieve the highest degree
of efficiency and uptime.
It gives us the most flexibility on the medias
because we have no restrictions at all.
So with that our publishers can order whatever they like
on every media they like,
and we get possible like the special project to deliver
something like that within seven days,
which is in the Offset world not possible at all.
- What was the benefits of digital publishing for us
was that we were very uncertain
about the quantity of sales in such
a moment where bookshops are closed.
So there was no estimate possible
how many copies should we print?
And our intention was to scale as much books as possible
in a very short time,
and to print the amount of books that was needed.
So we did very low first print run,
but it was sold out in a fortnight.
And this digital publishing benefit for us was to have some
possibility to reprint the books in a few days or in a
fortnight as well.
And to deliver it straight to the reader in the moment,
whereas this content is needed as a public audience.
- I think what really stood out to me
was the entire speed of the project,
especially during the beginning of the pandemic,
things were changing at an insane speed.
And especially as the creative
you really had to move fast
to keep up with current situation.
Which was very much also the case for this project.
But I was also very happy about the speed during
the publishing process, which was usually a very slow
and lengthy process, but it was very great
to see how quickly everything moved from start to
finish and almost kept up with the speeds that we usually
see in digital publishing. And I really,
really enjoyed that.
It was also really great to see the overall quality
of the book, because that was also a very big experiment.
Because as I mentioned before,
these were photos by all kinds of different people with all
kinds of different cameras,
some who had professional cameras, some had iPhones.
So it was very varying in quality,
but the overall result looked really great.
I was very happy about that.
And yeah, in general
I think this project was a really great example
how publishing can look in the future.
Which can actually sometimes be a lot more creative and take
bigger risks and be a little bit more experimental than what
we sometimes used to.