PrintingNews.com

Last week, we looked at the books on demand market in general, and some of the players making waves in that space. This week, we'll take a closer look at the technologies that make books on demand possible, as well as the finishing options available for these types of projects.

The Printing Factor

While front-end automation is an important part of a books-on-demand operation, selection of the optimum printing solution is important as well. There are a myriad of choices for printing in both color and black-and-white available in the market. In the Lightning Source's three plants (Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and the UK), the company has a total of 20 Océ VarioStream 9000 continuous feed digital presses. Color covers are produced on HP Indigo 5500, 3250, and 3050 digital presses. On an average day, the company:

• Manufactures more than 50,000 individual books;
• Fills 27,000 orders;
• Performs a minimum of 10 quality control checks per book;
• Adds 500 new titles to a digital library;
• Prints roughly 15 million pages;
• And adds 10 new publishers.

Lightning Source printed 13.5 million books in 2007—more than 3 billion pages. Book blocks are printed on the Océ presses, and covers are printed on Indigo presses. Barcodes are included on the back of the covers and on the very last page of each book block to facilitate matching the right cover with the right book block. The covers and book blocks are married at the bindery. Lightning Source has a 10-step QC process that ensures that each book is sound.

Bookmasters uses Konica Minolta 5100 and 6500 color presses along with a Konica 1050 black-and-white sheetfed press, and an Océ 8090 DemandStream roll-fed press. As mentioned last week, DiggyPOD uses an Océ sheetfed press for black-and-white, producing color on either a Xerox DocuColor 252, or a Presstek 34 DI press, depending upon volume requirements.

At drupa, Xerox, whose market research reflects that the revenue opportunity for digital books will more than double by 2015, was featuring six different book production applications. This included manuals and catalogs, as well as books on demand. One was a full-color children's book with Xerox FreeFlow workflow automation, and printing on the Xerox iGen3 110 Digital Production Press.

IT manuals were shown with a blend of black and color pages. For that application, monochrome pages were printed on a Xerox DocuPrint 180 sheetfed press, or a Xerox DocuPrint 525/1050 continuous feed (roll-fed) press. Pages with two colors were produced using a DocuTech Highlight Color System, and full-color pages were produced on a DocuColor 8000 or 6060 digital color press. This involves a more sophisticated workflow due to the need to split and reassemble pages based on color content. To address this need, Xerox was showing a highly automated workflow, beginning with the use of PrintCise software to validate orders, create production jobs, and submit them based on the color needed, load balance considerations, and collation requirements.

In a third example, a travel guide that required exceptional image quality featured color inserts and covers produced on a Xerox DocuColor 8000 digital color press with black-and-white text printed on a Xerox Nuvera 288 (twin-engine, 288 pages per minute) digital perfecting system.

Kodak showed on-demand book printing options as well, including a cookbook and a photo book. For the cookbook, prepress workflow was managed by the Kodak Smartboard Document Mastering Software. Color inserts and covers were produced on the Kodak NexPress M700 digital color press, with black-and-white pages being produced on the Kodak Digimaster EX150 digital production system. Integrated inline finishing was accomplished with a post-fusing inserter and finisher.