Books Bound for Greatness

Printers generally like to talk about investments they’ve made in print technologies—offset or digital. Perhaps that’s because it suggests they’re doing well and that they’re investing in their customers’ businesses. Besides, talking about a slick, new machine that requires little to no makeready time and gets up to color with minimal effort is sexy. Well, comparatively speaking.

The clunkier “back-office” equipment found in the typical finishing department is perhaps not as provocative, but talk to most any book printer or trade binder, and they’ll likely confide that the bindery machines are the real workhorses. Indeed, investing in the bindery is just as important to book printers as buying the hottest, fastest print engine. And a more modern, efficient bindery ultimately equates to better, faster and less expensive books for the publisher.

“In all our plants, we’ve got both soft-binding and case-binding equipment,” notes Jules Roux, vice president of Transcontinental Printing’s Book Group. “We’ve made some major investments over the past five years for our three plants, in order to provide the marketplace with additional capabilities and to capture additional volume.”

Being able to control the job start to finish is also important to Transcontinental and other printers, who see outsourcing book finishing as somewhat risky today.

“We’ve always had the philosophy at Transcontinental to control our own destiny,” Roux confides. “So, we have all our own binding equipment inside. … And today, turnaround is such a key variable.”

Roux estimates that the company has invested more than $60 million in new technologies for the book group alone. “We bought a new plant, a new press, new digital equipment and new binding equipment, of course,” he explains. “… Obviously, with the Canadian dollar rising in value above the U.S. dollar, we have to be more effective, more efficient, in order to remain competitive with the U.S. market, which is our fastest-growing market.”