April 2008-Ready for Prime Time: Short Run Hard Bound Binding

The advent of digital printing and improvements in short run offset printing have helped drive the demand for short run hard bound books. Benefits are being reaped by printers and their customers who have discovered that shorter runs result in lower inventory levels and less waste from product obsolescence. Better printing technology allows printers to get previously produced jobs on press faster and more accurately than ever before. 

This 2-up precollated text printed on a digital press was supplied to © 2010 Muscle Bound Bindery for a short, hard bound run.

Certainly there’s a time and place for conventional larger runs, but shorter, more frequent runs often lower total costs. Consider the publishing industry for a moment. Reprinting a title for 3,000 books will drive down the price per book cost, but if a publisher believes the reprint may remain in inventory for two or more years, the risk and costs involved with poor returns may not warrant producing that many. 

More frequent, smaller runs give customers more flexibility. Need to change content or product price? The risk of having an obsolete inventory is reduced or eliminated due to the advantages of digital printing. As the publishing industry has changed, so has Muscle Bound Bindery. Of course we love longer runs, but we often accommodate shorter runs for hard bound book binding in the 100-1000 piece range.

Here are some key areas to consider for your short run hard bound project:

• Grain direction. As in signature printing, it’s still important that your paper grain runs parallel to the bind edge. Otherwise spine waviness and paper warping may occur. The digital process can involve the addition of heat in fusing the toner to the paper which tends to dry the paper out and contributes to waviness and cracking in cross grain stocks.

• Allow for makereadies. As in traditional binding, we still need some makeready stock and will have some spoilage throughout the process. The exact amount depends on the bindery processes required, but to minimize spoilage of printed product we have customers supply 10-15 makereadies of exact thickness on blank stock. This also saves money in avoiding costly extra click charges on digital presses.

• Trimming the costs. There are advantages in ganging titles or a series of books in production with similar trim sizes and page counts as they can be ganged in production to avoid version charges and additional makereadies. This can greatly drive down the price per piece of each book.

• Film laminates: When wrapped printed covers are used, let us know if these are going to be digitally or offset printed. This may impact the film laminate we need to choose and sometimes advance testing is required, which could affect turnaround times.

The Muscle Bound Advantage
Muscle Bound Bindery has been providing strong binding solutions for more than forty years. In this time, we’ve gained a library of experience that we’re eager to share with our customers. Give the friendly experts at Muscle Bound a call today for help in planning your next successful bindery project.