Ipex is the largest printing technology trade show in the English speaking world, and it’s on at the moment. So I decided to go.

I knew it was going to be big, but nothing quite prepares you for 11 halls of the Birmingham NEC. It’s absolutely huge.

That’s not surprising when you get inside. There are companies that must have relocated their entire industrial operations into the NEC for a week. Vast stands, with massive machines churning out demo print after demo print. Robot arms lifting parcel after parcel of newsprint. Conveyor belts with box after box going round and round. And it’s all shiny, clean and, dare I say, beautiful.

Technology trade shows are the same the worldwide. There are suited men wearing wrap-around microphones demoing hypnotising high-speed lamination machines. Huge bags of publicity materials to avoid. Branded 32MB USB sticks. Prize draws for obscure pieces of technology.

I came away slightly surprised that the technology is still marching towards printing more copies, faster and glossier. I guess that’s valid for certain section of the industry, but that’s not what we’re trying to do.

We’ve made it no secret that we’d like to be able to print one copy of a newspaper, on demand, shipped to you, preferably in colour. If we were called Glossy Magazine Club, we’d be there. But the thinner paper of newsprint is still an issue for many of the short-run machines.

That said, there are a handful of companies making strides, and at risk of breaching our strict “under promise, over deliver” policy, hopefully we’ll be there before too long.

And it made me more excited about Newspaper Club. At its simplest, we wrap all of these amazing technologies and systems in a friendly face; something that the printing industry finds hard to do. And printing is going from strength to strength – presses are still being bought, and they’re getting smaller, less polluting and more efficient.

Overall, despite leaving the NEC smelling of toner, it was a day well spent.

We thought it would be a good idea to print a newspaper while we were there and seeing as our panel was at the end of the week we thought we would include content generated during the conference.

Things Our Friends Sent Us For Printing contained articles kindly written for us by Matt Jones, Bobbie Johnson, Clay Shirky, Warren Ellis, Dan Hill and James Bridle.

Chris Heathcote made a Buzz Word Bingo for our panel, David McCandless sent us a beautiful infographic, we included some Noticings from the week and we added a Walking Paper for Austin.

But my favourite bit was the centre spread. Foursquare and SimpleGeo very kindly gave us some anonymous checkin data from which Michal from Stamen made this gorgeous map of foursquare checkins during the conference. If you checked in on Monday, this was in the centre spread on Tuesday afternoon.

To make the newspaper we found this little nook inside the conference centre and set up a mini BRIG studio for two days.

The panel seemed to go really well and people seemed to like the newspaper which we handed out at the end.

Because our panel had Spime in the title, Bruce Sterling himself turned up. Luckily Twitter seemed to think he liked it.

One of the things we spoke about was analogue friction. Problems you encounter when making stuff in the real world as opposed to just on the web. We experienced this first hand as we neared the deadline for our newspaper just as Ev Williams started his keynote.

First they nicked Michal’s chair.

Then Engineering started to feel the pressure.

Then we tried to upload the files just as all the @ev’s brought the conference wifi to a halt. Eventually we had to go outside and upload via Michal’s MiFi.

We made it just in time.

We had a great time. Thanks to everyone who helped with the paper and thanks to everyone who came along to the panel.

Some of our inspiration has come from visiting the printing presses, which have changed relatively little in the last couple of decades. (You can see some photos from our previous visits in Flickr.) But the news-gathering, design and layout process has changed hugely, and it’s a bit of shame that it’s something that we can’t experience first hand anymore.

But still, there are some lovely pieces of footage. A friend watched Absence of Malice the other day, a 1981 film by Sydney Pollack, starring Paul Newman. And whilst watching the opening sequence he thought of us.

Clackity ticker-tape machines! Teletypes! Nasty chemicals! Lots of beeping! If we can evoke just the smallest bit of this feeling, then I’ll be a happy man indeed.

Merry Christmas from the Engineering Dept!

Note to the Sales & Marketing Dept: site does not include repetitive beeping noises.

But it was a success. Having the entire process of making a newspaper, from uploading all of the elements to receiving an order, was actually a lot of use, and provided a nice breather before the closing stage of Alpha testing began.

It’s also hugely useful in constructing the guide. With a sideways glance I can start getting used to the scale of the pages and the space of the layouts, and flipping between sheets to check details and workflow seems the right way to work out how a newspaper comes together.

I’ll be stressing in the guide the importance – and pleasure – of printing a PDF preview of your newspaper. It gets you a little closer to the physical sensation of holding one, a huge benefit when thinking about layout and content. Plus it’s always better to mark mistakes with a big red pen before you’ve ordered 500 copies.

Lots of people email us here at Newspaper Club Towers and they always remark what fun we must be having. Let’s shatter that myth now. For example this week we have been staring at spreadsheets and meeting people to thrash out a pricing, delivery and fulfillment strategy.

This is the stuff successful businesses are made of. Trust us, we’ve been told this lots of times this week.

You may think supply chain management is boring (we do) but it’s essential. It’s non trivial, in fact. It involves calculations and spreadsheets, it involves actual numbers and actual weights and actual prices rather than just guesswork and theory.

But we’ve made some serious progress this week. The pricing for our launch products has been agreed and we should be able to announce that in 10 days time. We’ve created a logistics system we’re comfortable with and we have a distribution solution that will work smoothly. That means we can sell you a product and deliver it to your door effortlessly and cost effectively. That’s the stuff CRM legends are made of.

We’ve also spoken to some corporate clients and we’ve met with some new and exciting newspaper printers.

But this quote was probably the most thought provoking bit of the week, “There are lots of things that have never been done with print before, just because nobody has ever bothered too ask.”

Slowly it’s all coming together.

Like most meeting accommodation,  the facilities were mixed. Lacking in biscuits but offering a selection of boiled sweets. We weren’t offered a cup of tea but there was a Starbucks very nearby. Pens and paper were liberally available for ideation.

And best of all it was cheap. Free in fact.

Actually, it was Russell’s house. These details are important when you’re a start up.

The point of this session was to discuss (and hopefully) resolve the ‘What happens when you press ORDER’ question. I’m happy to announce we cracked that. We can’t tell you what happens just yet for confidentiality reasons, but the gist of it is that you’ll get an order number.

We must apologise for bothering you with all this trivial chat about orders and fulfillment, it must be terribly boring for you. It is for us. So, on to more exciting news!

Today we are pleased to announce our initial launch product line up! (Subject to change.)

We want to launch with a variety of products that allows different people to use newspaper club to do different things, but at the same time we want to keeps simple and make it as easy as possible for people to make their own newspapers, hence us offering a 12 page newspaper over certain quantities.

For launch the very low numbers are only available in black and white; 12 pages and 5 copies, 20 copies, 100 copies or 500 copies.

And these are available in full colour; 12 pages and 500 copies, 1000 copies, 2000 copies or 5000 copies.

You could in theory influence this line up by commenting below.

Anyway, we’ve had a good productive week, but now it’s the weekend so we need to unwind.

For summer holiday reading this year I grabbed five articles from my delicious feed and popped them into an 8 page newspaper. I then packed the newspaper with my panama and found it made the perfect accompaniment to a G&T by the pool.

There are several interesting points here. Firstly, we are experimenting with newsprint and part of that involves thinking about what an individual (or a very small group of people) could do with a newspaper. As Matt Locke pointed out in January, newsprint is hard to be beat for reading in certain situations. On a packed train, or by the pool for instance. I didn’t want to take my laptop to the pool (we weren’t on holiday in LA) and the articles were too long to read on an iPhone.

Newsprint holds up surprisingly well after it gets wet and it’s durable enough to be folded and stuffed inside a bag at the end of the day. I took two copies with me just in case one got ruined, but in the end I only needed to use one.

Secondly, I also wanted to experiment with templates. This newspaper wasn’t made with our automatic online newspaper layouter tool, but the designs I used could be incorporated into the system.

One of the design challenges is to create something flexible enough so that it can handle different sized article lengths and headline lengths and then automatically resize and still look good. The column width on the right hand article is obviously way to wide, but I’m really pleased with the spacing and the layout of the article on the left, which auto scales and balances and still looks good and readable.

But the really big news here is about quantity. Newspaper printers are naturally geared up to print hundreds of thousands of copies very quickly. So when you ask them for a few hundred they look at you a bit funny. Recently we have found a digital newspaper printer who will print as little as five copies. Yes, just 5 copies.

This is a huge breakthrough and opens up many more possibilities for Newspaper Club, which we will explore and then diligently blog about here.

We’ve been out and about meeting with some newspaper printers this week. And, as often in life, there is some good news and there is some bad news.

Bad news; they can’t do what we’d like them to do, yet. At least the ones we spoke to can’t.

Good news; they don’t think we’re mad (this is important) and they are willing to discuss different ways to achieve what we’d like them to do. This is the bit that could have derailed the whole project, so this really is good news, although it doesn’t appear that exciting.

And it’s also good that we’re starting to talk to printers about this stuff. As we’ve mentioned before, there is a part of every project that just involves getting on with it. This is the bit they describe as a ‘numbers game’ on The Apprentice. Not glamorous, but essential.

Come to think of it, none of this is glamorous.