Debbie Too
BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN
THEY say it’s a waste of time to try to reinvent the wheel. But Abas Publishers has decided to defy this commonly held belief as it cashes in on people’s penchant for picture mementos.
Abas Publishers started business in the 1980s, printing information booklets and other literature for government and corporate clients. But the printing company has decided to nose into new territory, with its “photobook” a photo album, but with a twist.
“What do you know about photobooks? To you maybe you’ve seen wedding photos and your idea of a photobook is a book with hard cardboard pages of photos,” says Idham Abas, general manager of the printing business that has been operating since the 1980s.
“Under Printerku, we develop and publish photobooks that are printed on magazine quality paper, with a hard cover. It can be personalised however the customer wants it to be,” he says.
“So let’s say you went on a holiday and you’ve taken hundreds of photos but then you’re going to upload maybe one or two albums on Facebook or the Internet, there is no way for you to enjoy them or show them to your friends and family unless you go to a photo shop and have them all printed,” says Idham.
He says the idea for a personalised photobook came to him when his dad went on a trip and came back with thousands of photos but had no way to truly appreciate it. “Most people now upload their photos on Facebook to share, but not a lot of parents will have Facebook so there’s no real way of truly appreciating these type of photos,” he says.
“Last time, when people were using film cameras, they had no choice but to develop their photos so they can see them, but now with digital cameras being so popular, it is very rare that people will go develop their photos,” says Idham.
“If you’re going to take about a thousand photos, you’re lucky to print 10, so we thought how can we capture that market of photos, of people who love taking photos but they are storing them online; they tend to forget about it,” says Idham.
“Now with a photobook, you can choose how you want the cover to look, the content on each page and how the page layout looks, so it’s like having your very own coffee-table book,” says Idham.
“The best thing about the book is that it is personalised. It’s got sentimental value and we do not expect a minimum order if the customer wants to publish a book,” says Shaffique Hussien, creative director of Abas Publishers and Printerku. “The photobooks can be published in just three to five days and be delivered, depending on the complexity of the page layout. If a customer wanted say 10 books with the same content but different covers, we can also do that,” says Shaffique.
Idham says that Abas Publishers’ clients used to be from the corporate and government sectors. But now, he says, Abas Publishers is targeting ordinary consumers.
Idham says like any other business Abas faces obstacles and challenges. Mostly, he says, it has to do with educating the consumers.
Shaffique says, “Some of our customers don’t know that a photobook is affordable, and some of them don’t know that we have this product, which is why we developed the brand Printerku so our customers can identify with our photobook product better.”
He adds that some of their customers aren’t aware that they can print just one book. “We had one special request last time from a customer, who is a schoolteacher and her class wanted to have a one-of-a-kind going-away present for another teacher who was leaving,” says Shaffique. He adds that what the teacher did was to ask her students to come up with a recipe of their own and Abas Publishers created a recipe book for the teacher.
Idham sees the market for photobooks as a growing segment of the publishing industry because demand for photo developing is weakening.
“We had photobooks before, but now under the sub-brand Printerku, we want to aggressively market this product because it’s a good product.”
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