Applications Compendium Introduction

18-02-2009

Perfect Binding Comes of Age for Short-Run Production

It’s no secret that digital technology democratized publishing, enabling anyone with access to a computer and an output device to produce and print colorful covers and page after page of books from the simplest to the sophisticated.

But book covers and pages are merely raw materials. Once produced, they must be bound together and trimmed to become a useable, saleable product.

Generating the content of early books often took years of painstaking effort; and their hand-sewn pages and durable, hardcover bindings reflected that craftsmanship. Tapping into the postwar population boom and fast-paced lifestyle of the 1950s and 1960s, publishers found a receptive market for “softcovers” typified by the paperback novel and popular titles like Readers Digest, TV Guide and National Geographic.

These new books utilized perfect binding, the method in which the spine of the assembled signatures is attached by a flexible adhesive to a heavier-weight paper cover. Perfect-bound books could be produced much more quickly and inexpensively than any hardcover, and the method quickly gained acceptance.

Although perfect binding required less time, money and materials than hardcover manufacturing, industrial-quality perfect binding machines even today are not what could be called “operator-friendly.” Originally designed to mass-produce popular titles, perfect binding production lines to this day involve massive machines that are hard to set up and difficult to operate. But put a crew of skilled operators at the controls, and they can bind thousands of books with the same content and covers hour after hour.

Unlike so many other industries, the digital revolution was slow to change bookbinding. In 1990 Xerox introduced the DocuTech, a commercial-sized digital printer able to produce runs of one or one thousand xerographically, in real time and – comparatively speaking – real fast. Even so, the design and operation of most commercial perfect binding machines kept plodding along, unmoved by the advent of on-demand print production.

All except one.

In 1995, the C.P. Bourg Companies cemented its position as industry pioneer when it commercially introduced and installed the world’s first in-line perfect binder, the BBF2005 Perfect Binder, to work with the new Xerox DocuTech.

The Bourg BBF2005 was fully integrated mechanically and electronically with the DocuTech output, uniquely able to match the printer’s speed and versatility. Relying on a single operator to set up the job stream, the BBF2005 enabled corporate and commercial printers to produce perfect-bound documents of various sizes, shapes and content on-demand.

With binding and finishing able to handle digitally-produced output in real time, the BBF2005 presented possibilities previously unimagined. And for the first time in history, bookbinding became an integral part of print production.

For its achievement, C.P. Bourg in 1996 won a prestigious InterTech™ Technology Award from the Graphic Arts Technical Foundation, now PIA/GATF.

Bourg’s BBF2005 document binder is still available today and as competitive as it is productive for customers of more than 600 BBF2005 units installed at sites around the world – enduring testimony to its innovative design, production quality and efficiency.

However, moving from conventional perfect binding to digital production in a single jump left a void in the market between the tightly coupled in-line workflow from digital printers and mass produced single titles. The missing link was a machine that could handle books from digital printers and offset presses, and perfect-bind books of one, or one thousand, quickly, efficiently and at high quality – in a word, profitably.

Drawing on its success with conventional and digital workflows, C.P. Bourg engineers in 2003 applied those lessons learned to the design of a totally automated near-line perfect binder. Bourg’s BB3002 Perfect Binder hails from the head of the pack in performance, versatility and quality for both short and long run perfect binding.

And, as you would expect from the world leader in post-printing solutions, the BB3002 is a machine that’s again changing all the rules.

With fast, economical and quality perfect binding available near-line, corporate in-plants, commercial printers, trade binderies and Internet self-publishing portals have an expanded world of options. Now books can be bound from offset or digital streams, and completely different jobs ganged to capitalize on similarities and maximize production efficiencies. Now, “Books of One” can be bound as efficiently as hundreds.

Among its many advances, the Bourg BB3002 uniquely features an icon-driven operating system displayed on an 11-inch color touchscreen. This operator-friendly interface allows most functions – including milling, in-line side gluing, scoring and suction cover-feeding – to be easily selected from a list of menu options and set digitally.

Symmetrical Cover Registration, another Bourg advance, makes the most of the BB3002 onboard computer technology. As the BB3002 clamps the book block, it automatically measures thickness and calculates the centerline of the cover to fasten the spine perfectly, without fail. Symmetrical Cover Registration also enables binding books of the same size and different thicknesses one after another automatically, without operator intervention.

The BB3002 also excels at the many other capabilities required for short run perfect binding:
• An automatic jogger with amplitude and vibration control adjusts to paper type and book thickness.
• Programmable milling up to 3 mm with up to 4 notching tools and thickness bypass speeds set-up and ensures quality.
• Operator programmed automatic side-gluing eliminates manual adjustments and errors.

In addition, the BB3002 binds up to 600 books per hour as small as 3.5 x 3.9 inches and up to 12.59 x 15.15 inches to meet its full-rated cover spec of 27.9 x 15.5 inches.

Unlike the cumbersome and often manual procedures required by even the most advanced conventional perfect binders, Bourg’s innovative application of digital technologies in the BB3002 allow a single operator of virtually any skill level to set-up even a complex bind and start producing one or more books within one minute.

The advanced design and high degree of automation on the BB3002 leads to uncompromising quality and significantly higher productivity for any workflow mix, whether producing a steady stream of identical volumes, entire shifts of “books of one,” or anything in-between.

These qualities also make it possible for the BB3002 shop to accept a range of jobs limited only by the imagination of businesses and consumers who are just beginning to see the power and possibility of digital printing.

Those who use it agree: Perfect binding for short-run production adds up to nothing short of a perfect opportunity.
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