In the world of the bindery, there is a very clear dividing line between the world before digital printing and the world after it. Not only has digital printing affected the investment decisions of printers and trade binders, but it’s played havoc with the R&D budgets of vendors as well. It’s not just that the decisions are different; it’s that they’ve become a moving target.
Inexpensive tabletop equipment abounds, but as the market grows in sophistication, demands on the finished products are growing. Robust digital bindery equipment can be expensive, up to $100,000, making the barriers to entry high at the production level. Still, the technology is always changing, driving down costs and improving cost justification. For example, C.P. Bourg has calculated that its off-line BB3002 PUR single-clamp perfect binder, with a single operator running at 70% capacity, will break even at 218 books per day – something that can be achieved in 38 minutes. That would have been unheard of even a few years ago.
We are also seeing tremendous advances in automation and intelligence; creasing and folding technology (notably, the Morgana’s $38,000 DigiFold 5000, which uses flying knife technology to eliminate the issue of toner cracking across the fold); and accommodations for 1:1 printing; as well as sturdier construction and the integration of more traditional binding methods like PUR.
Still, there are a number of remaining challenges.
A clear dividing line between traditional offset binderies and digital binderies
Run length requirements, the differences in inks and coatings and the fact that digital output does not require gathering or collating means that, unless a shop is willing to use digital as a loss leader, it needs to set up separate binding lines for the digital and offset sides of the business. Or, if its offset runs are relatively short, it can invest in comprehensive digital binding capable of handling both digital and traditional output.
Barrier to entry
For shops just getting into digital finishing, the costs are still high for production-quality equipment like digital perfing, cutting, scoring and slitting. Users complain that for the price these devices are still relatively slow.
Productivity and profitability in the digital bindery is dependent upon the level of automation
Yet, the internal mechanics of digital presses, including front, back or side registration, mean that inline production can be a white elephant. Not just because it locks the press into a specific type of work, but because it can also lock printers into a specific brand of press. Printers wanting to switch from a Xerox to a Canon, for example, or from an HP to a NexPress may need to either purchase new equipment or move the equipment offline.
Digital as a loss leader
The need to capitalize two separate binding lines has caused some print shops to decide against investing in the digital bindery. Among them is Pacific Bindery, the largest bindery in Western Canada, which has evaluated the options and decided that it is not justified by its current volume of work.
“The percentage of our work that is digital is probably less than 5%,” says Kris Bovay, general manager for Pacific Bindery, Vancouver. “Many digital printers have invested in their own binding lines, and it wouldn’t be economical for us to convert all of our equipment to hit the digital market.”
Pacific Bindery, Vancouver, operates perfect, lay-flat, and mechanical binding, stitching, folding, collating and padding, including equipment that it dedicates to “short-run” conventional offset and digital. However, even the most efficient short-run machines typically will not produce profitability for digital.
“We have a Horizon BQ that can perfect bind from one book up to 500 (or even 1000), but it’s not always the most economical choice,” says Bovay. “On our other two perfect binding machines, we can run 12,000 books an hour and 8,000 books an hour. While run sizes have gotten smaller, there is still demand for quantities over 1000. So for our plant, short run bindery has become somewhat of a loss leader. We don’t make money on it, but it provides a service for a client who is giving us other work. We do it to maintain the relationship.”
Why wouldn’t the bindery invest in digital on the promise of growth in this marketplace? Isn’t such growth inevitable? Maybe. Digital may be growing as a percentage of the overall mix, but there will still be longer run offset for the foreseeable future and many printers will continue putting in their own digital postpress equipment.
“The risk is that everyone says, you have to go into this, or it’s a lost opportunity, and then we spend the big bucks and the work doesn’t materialize,” says Bovay. “Our service strategy is to ask our customers annually what new business they are looking at, what new markets they are exploring, where they are seeing growth, what needs are unfulfilled, so we’re keeping an eye on new opportunities at all times.”
Going full digital
On the other side of the equation is Lehmann Bookbinding, which has not only embraced the digital bindery, but has placed all of its eggs in the digital basket. Its customer base is split between commercial, education (universities, high schools) and libraries. Because of its focus on bookbinding, the clear trend toward POD in publishing makes the switch to digital a natural choice. Still, the transition was not an easy one.
“We were one of the first to get into digital because our clients were some of the first to get digital,” says Rob Lehmann, co-owner of the bookbinder. “Suddenly we were dealing with different types of paper, different laminates and different sealants on the papers. We had to adjust quickly because our clients were still expecting us to bind anything that they sent us. Plus, they wanted turnarounds in three days.”
Today, Lehmann Bookbinding can bind a book in any way possible, but it’s the result of years of experimentation, research and communication with customers. “If there is good communication, we can come back with a good product without having to research our options. But, it’s streamlined because of the research and communication — not because the issues themselves have disappeared,” Lehmann says.
Today, 80% of Lehmann’s trade work is digital, and the shop is transitioning to short-run equipment. It has even purchased two Xerox presses (one black-and-white, one colour). “The long run is slowly fading away,” says Lehmann. “Publishers aren’t stocking 50,000 and 60,000 books like they used to. Now the requests are for one, two, 10, 500, or 1000. We no longer see the need to keep the larger equipment.”
As the digital bookbinding business continues to grow, so do the number of product introductions. For example, in the hardcover market, LBS has developed its Universal and Combined Endsheets, which allow an adhesive perfect binder to make hardcover books by substituting either endsheet for the cover in the cover feeder. These products consist of a single or double endsheet (with a fly-leaf) pre-attached to a reinforcing tape strip made of cotton cambric cloth. When processed through an adhesive binder, this endsheet is glued to the sheets, producing a book block that is ready for the hardcover casing-in process. The cotton cambric cloth can be switched to a stretch cloth if the book needs to be rounded.
Remaining critical issues
Where is the digital bindery today? What are some of the most critical advances and what issues still remain? Faster speeds on minimum run jobs is always a plus as well as a continued expansion in format sizes (currently, the Bourg BME Booklet Maker offers the largest sheet size available — 14.5”×23.5”; some say it’s time to get 15×20 sheets out there).
There is also a call for more top-loading equipment. “We found through experimentation that when you are top-loading, there is less chance of mistakes, especially if you have postal sorts,” says Frank McPherson, president of Custom Data Imaging, a digital and 1:1 printing specialist in Toronto. “The operator can check the bottom sheet and the next sheet, and by doing that, we found that we had fewer remakes.”
The challenge is that technology is moving so fast that printers want to be able to swap out their presses, if they think another brand would be a good fit. As a result, customers who once dealt only with Xerox are entertaining Minolta, Canon, Kodak Nexpress or HP. “This causes vendors fits,” says Don Schroeder, vice president of sales for C.P. Bourg. “Some presses print left to right; some print right to left; some are front register; others are back register. Customers say, ‘I have this bookletmaker on a Xerox unit, I want to roll over and connect to Canon or Kodak. Can I do that?’ The answer is, no. On the offset side, some bookletmakers are 15-20 years old. In digital, printers may change presses and brands every three to five years.”
One way that Horizon has met this challenge is by developing binders, folders and saddlestitchers that are designed to straddle the offset and digital worlds. One example is the Horizon HOF high-speed sheet feeder, which can be incorporated into a conventional collating and saddlestitching line to permit production of pre-collated digital or offset-printed sheets through one flexible system. The HOF also supports sheet-level integrity checking to support whatever level of verification may be needed.
Other manufacturers are focused on producing highly-automated nearline finishers, which are press-neutral. Many also have barcode technology or sheet feeders with optical readers on the last sheet for fast changeover between jobs.
Evaluating inline solutions
While many digital printers might feel that nearline finishing is a second-best finishing option, others say not so fast. Custom Data Imaging, which uses near-line finishing, conducted an experiment with inline finishing and noticed that its production speed dropped drastically. “We did a test with one of the manufacturers and found that we were actually losing about 25% in production,” says McPherson. “In this case, the test booklet was an odd size, so we had to run it 8 ½ x 11 and cut it down. At the end of the day, we weren’t saving any time.”
The quick disconnects of nearline equipment and its ability to be shuttled from station to station on wheels in minutes offer a lot of flexibility, and for some jobs, even greater productivity. For example, on the conventional side, Heidelberg’s ST 450 saddlestitcher is fully automated, and each of the different pockets has quick disconnects on wheels. In a couple of minutes, the printer can have the pockets moved from one end of the machine to the other. “You can reconfigure it like a LEGO,” says Manuel Gutierrez, product manager for finishing, Heidelberg Canada.
On the digital side, advanced intelligent automation and colour touchscreens come on a variety of POD equipment as well. “All Horizon BQ-series binders come with intelligent automation and allow operators who don’t have bindery experience — in many cases the same operators who are running the digital printers — to achieve professional quality results,” says Mark Hunt, director of marketing at Standard Finishing Systems. “These binders also sport a digital caliper that measures book thickness and transfers the data to the binder for fully automatic setup.”
Entry-level backlash
Although all of this automation sounds great, it also costs money. For this reason, printers and binderies feeling the pressure to get into digital binding may be tempted to purchase less expensive fast-bind and other technology that lets you get into the market at a lower price of entry, but caution is in order.
“Many people want to turn around a product and get it out there, but if a book falls apart, as far as I’m concerned, we didn’t do our job,” says Lehmann. “That’s why we stayed away from the cheaper methods of binding books.”
One of the binder’s recent purchases is the Bourg BB3002, the first single-clamp PUR perfect binder that fully automates book manufacturing down to a run length of one. Lehmann chose PUR because, unlike EVA adhesives, which are often found on the less expensive machines, PUR provides resistance to a wide variety of inks, varnishes, oils and solvents that migrate into the glue line and can cause some EVA adhesives to fail on certain substrates, such as coated stocks, photographic papers, recycled stocks, cross-grain stocks, acetates and digitally imaged stock.
“For what we want to do, PUR is a necessity,” says Lehmann. “Now we can bind pretty much any type of paper with cover stock at any length. Trying to setup a job of 25-50 books on a nine-clamp binder like our Muller Martini Panda is difficult. On this machine, the first book is a good book. Plus, we don’t have to charge the setup fees like we do on a larger binder.”
(Horizon takes another approach by allowing users to switch between EVA and PUR on the same machine. Its four-clamp BQ-470 features interchangeable glue tanks, letting operators switch from EVA to PUR in minutes).
Return to robustness
As the digital binding industry turns to tried and true methods of binding, it should be no surprise that we’re seeing a focus on a more robust approach to manufacturing, hence manufacturers like Heidelberg entering the POD binding market.
Gutierrez is referring, in part, to its Eurobind 600 and Eurobind 1300, which Heidelberg reintroduced at drupa last year. The new models include high automation and integration with the touchscreen, improvements to the milling station and the option of PUR. These changes improve flexibility, and make operation easy with short makreadies while achieving high throughput and quality that rivals the larger binders. Another approach to resolving the cost-quality-turnaround dilemmas in the digital world is pre-conversion—the creation of pre-converted products so that no post converting is required. Although it removes the flexibility of full customization, pre-conversions can remove the bottlenecks and pain of gluing, perfing, scoring, die-cutting, and other complex bindery steps.
What about 1:1?
One of the remaining challenges for the digital bindery is the ability to handle the data-driven personalization market. “The ability to handle different sizes and formats in a one-off sequence is driving companies like us crazy,” says Schroeder. “One set is two sheets of paper, finished into an eight-page booklet, but the next is a 200-page booklet to stitch, fold and trim. The industry doesn’t yet have a cost-effective, dynamic stitcher to adjust the length of the stitch and accommodate the variable page count. Until that is developed, the best you can do is complete automation to take the makeready down as low as it will go.”
Along with 1:1 production is job tracking and reporting. Gone are the days of 5% or 10% overages. Every record needs to count, and in 1:1 jobs, your error rate must be 0%. In POD, if the client wants 100 books, you print 100 books. If you are finishing inline, the press will do the tracking for you. If you are finishing offline or near-line, you need to be looking at some other type of system, such as barcode matching, infrared or video verification.
Manufacturers are putting a lot of research and development dollars into developing such systems, but for job tracking and verification to gain widespread adoption, it needs to be more cost-effective. Currently, if you are looking at barcode readers on an offline solution, for example, you are looking anywhere from $10,000 to $35,000. In some cases, this can be as much as the machine itself.
But, the technology that is available is highly effective. Bourg’s BME Booklet Maker, for example, has set integrity features built in, where if a set is not complete, the machine will kick it out to a reject tray, where the operator can correct and re-feed it. The machine communicates directly with the Bourg BST Tower Collator (or soon, the BSF Sheet Feeder), so the feeder knows what it is sending to the BME, and using sensors within the device, the BME acknowledges this information and makes sure that what is stitched, folded and trimmed is the correct set and sequence.
For some applications, such as the matching of envelopes and inserts, there are developments that work around the issue of matching the various components. An example is the Kern EasyMailer, which actually creates the insert and the envelope from the same sheet of paper. It takes a plain 11” x 17” sheet printed on a Xerox digital press, cuts it into two 8 ½” x 11” sheets, then folds the first sheet into an envelope. The second sheet is the letter insert. This gives the printer the ability to create matching full-colour, data-driven messages on both the envelope and the letter—all in a contiguous stream.
What about JDF?
Will JDF eventually be the answer? Perhaps, but all indications are that time is not now. While some have predicted that the one aspect of the industry most likely to embrace JDF is the bindery, the challenge is, again, capitalization.
“For JDF to work, it has to be embraced at every stage, and right now, there’s almost no one doing that,” argues McPherson. “On the conventional side, if someone bought a cutter 10 years ago, to get it brought up to speed for JDF, he has another 15 years to go — maybe longer. I know people who have had Muller Martini bookletmakers for 35 years. If they buy a new one, they will have two, one is JDF and one is not. This is the hidden problem with electronic dockets and job definition. How are you, in prepress, going to decide whether that job will go to the JDF machine or not?”
Not even all manufacturers are on board with JDF in any case. Some, such as Muller Martini and Horizon, have taken a lead, with all newly-developed machines being JDF-compatible. Horizon will introduce an all-new JDF bindery control platform at Print 09 that will gather production metrics from across the bindery to inform better post-press decision-making. Others, such as C.P. Bourg, are coming up with intelligent, sensor-driven technology that provides a high level of automation on a proprietary basis until the industry settles on a standard.
What impact has all of this had on offset binding? It’s really put pressure on those kludged together workflows to become more efficient. Manufacturers are forced to continually upgrade even the longer run equipment to be more efficient, with faster makeready, more automation, and including the same benefits you find on the digital side.
Not that digital and offset binderies are competing with one another, but more that offset has to find increasing ways to become more competitive, period.
“The key for us is to provide equipment that is extremely flexible that takes output from both offset and digital, UV coating inks, laminated substrates and other elements. It has to be extremely user-friendly for fast setups and changeovers. Yet, we also have to consider the total cost of ownership or operation, which speaks to maintenance and repair. Many customers today don’t want to invest in a maintenance contract, preferring to do at least some of their own maintenance and repairs,” says Schroeder.
For shops just looking to get into a really good digital bindery, what might it cost? If the shop is just getting into digital, it might need to invest only in a single-clamp perfect binder, which can cost less than $60,000 for full automation. For another $60,000, they might consider adding an integrated digital stitch-fold-trim machine. Adding a collator or sheet feeder brings the total tab to about $160,000. All those pieces of equipment are also designed to handle conventional business, bringing the bindery up to speed to handle both digital and conventional offset in an efficient manner.
To equip the bindery to the teeth, however, they might be looking at $500,000 for highly automated gathering, binding and trimming as a complete process, with the automation needed to handle digital output, while still enabling their conventional processes to run at high speed.
It’s a lot for shops to absorb, especially with the world of prepress and printing changing quickly as well. Printers and trade binderies have a lot of balls in the air, and with all of the product introductions, the changing ROI equations, and constantly shifting customer demands, capital investments have become a moving target. But, the good news is, if you can’t hit your target today, wait a few weeks. The equation will change again.