Increasing demand for hard back books has led to investment in case binding preparation system from Horizon by ESP Colour.
The Swindon company has acquired an ESF1000 end sheet feeder, GF500 gauze feeder and LBF loose sheet book block feeder. These add to a new Horizon BQ500 perfect binder and HT300 trimmer.
This will enable the printer to increase production of cased in books meeting a demand from commercial print customers, single copy print on demand customers and a growing spread of established book publishers says head of digital production and operations Dave Woloszcyznski.
The company has been onboarding additional book publishers that have approached the business on a word of mouth basis.
The books will be cased in on an existing Miter and ODM units which have excess capacity. “But we needed to increase our binding as more and more of our customers wanted us to produce hard cover, PUR and soft cover books. This was a process that might need three production steps,” he says.
The books are being printed on the company’s two Canon iX300 printers. “We are growing quite considerably in this area,” Woloszcyznski adds.
“Previously, our case bound book production was split across two separate machines. With the investment we’ve consolidated this process into a single, streamlined workflow.
“This integration not only improves production efficiency but also reduces the cost per unit for case bound books. We are producing a lot more short runs digitally and this is a more cost effective way of completing the jobs.”
The Horizon equipment was supplied through IFS which has proved a trustworthy supplier to EPS in the past, something that was weighed up when the investment was made. He says: “We did look at other suppliers, but we wanted to work with someone we were confident we could easily contact and whey would provide any help if we needed it.”
“With the new system we can also meet the increased demand we have been managing and now have the capacity to take on new business. In fact, we have onboarded some new publishers recently and the investment has meant we have been able to service them perfectly from day one.”
