Paul Parisi

Eugene G. Schwartz is editor at large for ForeWord Reviews, an industry observer and an occasional columnist for Book Business magazine. In an earlier career, he was in the printing business and held production management positions at Random House, Prentice-Hall/Goodyear and CRM Books/Psychology Today. A former PMA (IBPA) board member, he has headed his own publishing consultancy, Consortium House. He is also Co-Founder of Worthy Shorts Inc., a development stage online private press and publication service for professionals as well as an online back office publication service for publishers and associations. He is on the Publishing Business Conference and Expo Advisory Board.

Acme Bookbinding Company (Acme) and The HF Group (HFG) are pleased to announce a new partnership and that, effective immediately, these two established family businesses have merged.

Book-production management is, in many respects, an act of faith. For some, faith in the universality of Murphy’s Law—if something can go wrong, it will. Or, faith that virtue is its own reward—if you do everything right, things will always come out right. Old hands come to realize that “trust but verify” is probably the most prudent maxim to apply in managing workflow. Without systems in place and proven procedures, we’d have to reinvent the wheel every time. But without an occasional revisit to the last batch of XBIT transactions or Job Definition Format (JDF) specifications sent through, that error in the PMS color

Acme Bookbinding's newest worker can't get injured on the job when doing back-breaking work. The reason: It's a robot. One of the most labor-intensive and expensive tasks in our industry is the chore of cutting cover materials for hardcover bindings. Generally, cutting cover materials is not a problem for large edition bindings. Kolbus and Crawley have furnished the industry with equipment where cover materials cut from rolls are de-curled, and are either sheeted or cut to size, with remarkable efficiency. Still, lifting a 54" roll of covering material, and mounting it into a cloth cutting machine, is hard, back-breaking work. These days, with larger edition runs increasingly

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