Keele rises to university challenge

The bookbinding department at Keele University used to have a flourishing business, binding up academic journals into hardback collections that would sit on library shelves and be referred to by generations of students asked to compile an essay. But that line of work has disappeared as journals have gone online.

Far from a disaster, the migration has been a blessing for the department, which under manager Mark Jukes has taken its skills into a wider forum and now runs web sites offering print and binding on demand for local people, and with work even coming in from mainland Europe as would be authors and publishers log on to the selfpublishingdirect.co.uk and bookprintingdirect.co.uk web sites.

“The book binding and print industry has been going through difficult times,” says Jukes, “and where our market used to be higher education libraries, that has disappeared because journals are now online, so we had to find a completely new market. So we used the internet to move into self publishing. As a consequence most of the work we do is now for external clients.”

The traditional skills deployed on conservation work or on case-binding volumes of journals are used on limited numbers of case bound books that are ordered online, though the majority of demand is for paperbacks. These are being produced on a Horizon BQ270c, recently installed to keep pace with growing demand. It arrived shortly after a KonicaMinolta BizHub 5501 gave the department its own colour digital printing capability. This joined KM mono BizHub Pro 1050 and Sharp MXM 850 digital presses.

The operation had experience of Horizon with an older single clamp machine so moving to the highly automated higher specification machine was a natural step, though not an automatic one. Jukes says: “We did look at other binders before choosing the BQ270 including Heidelberg’s Eurobind. We liked the heavy-duty build of the binder and its high level of automation. What is very useful is the fact you can fine tune adjustments throughout the process down to tenth of a millimetre which means you can allow for any drift there might be in the digital print. This is very important when completing the short runs where there isn’t a lot of overs. It also mills the edge off litho printed work which enables us to take on any trade finishing.”

Keele has the latest version of the binder with larger touch screen interface with altered user interface. It is also fitted with the autocaliper feature which by measuring the spine of the book will automatically adjust all its other settings. The benefit is that make-ready becomes a two-three minute process, making short run production entirely feasible. For outside work, production runs start at 25 copies and run beyond 1,000, though the average is around 100 copies, he says. Production speed is 500 books an hour.

The addition of colour printing to the print side of the department will allow it to increase its footprint of print that is required in the day to day life of the university. Currently around 50% of print is put out to the trade, though the aim is to eat into this through being able to offer short run fast response colour printing. Jukes is looking at the possibility of producing personalised prospectuses as some universities have started to do. The quality of the colour digital press also opens the way to offer photobooks and similar products in future. “We are still doing a lot of reports and document binding for the university,” Jukes says. “We are also binding student theses, though I expect that will go to an electronic format in time. What we are doing is preparing ourselves for that next stage.”

That the department has been able to do this already was recognised by the agreement to invest in the operation. “We also have a single sided desktop laminator so we can pretty much everything in house, and we still have the traditional skills, so we can mix production, offering 75 paperbacks and 25 case bound for a run of 100 copies for example.

“And these days producing 100 paperbacks brings in more than conservation work on a 16th century volume.”