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Don't Let Bindery Hold You Back
September 27, 2008

If you are considering producing a 1:1 printing or other digital-print-driven job, one of the considerations you need to factor in is bindery.

There are three primary issues:

• Jobs produced on digital presses come off collated—jobs from offset presses come off uncollated.
• Digital jobs can have diverse page mixes based on content, page count, and media.
• If digital jobs will be folded, they may need to be pre-scored to avoid cracking across the fold.

For these reason, if printers are going to offer the same bindery options in digital as they are offset, they often have to make dedicated “digital bindery” purchases to do it. Not every digital printer has made the same bindery investments, so if you are looking to do a digital job, you may want to ask your printer about what dedicated investments it has made.

What if a printer has not made a dedicated investment in its digital bindery? It doesn't mean that the shop cannot do your job. It simply means that the turnaround may take longer or, if you have very specific needs, it may need to job out certain aspects of the job.

Should this dissuade you from producing a digital job? Absolutely not. Especially now that high-speed file transfer means you can use any printer in the country. If you have a need, there is a printer out there who can fill it. And with the unique needs (often) of the digital bindery, handling outsourced jobs has become all but a profession for some shops, so with the efficiencies they are able to provide, it isn't necessarily going to cost you more. 

The point is simply to be aware that binding and finishing in the digital world is different, so when you are making plans to produce a digital print job, you should keep the end product in mind. Start asking questions about the finishing aspects of the job—in the beginning.

Like this post? It is excerpted from "Digital Printing: Transforming Business and Marketing Models," available from Digital Printing Reports.

Have questions? Comments? I'd love to hear from you. You can email me at info@digitalprintingreports.com. For more information on primers for marketers and small businesses on digital, 1:1, Web-to-print, and personalized URL applications, visit Digital Printing Reports. You can also keep up with all of my posts on EBS, The Inspired Economist ("Greening Print Marketing"), and other blog sites by following me on Twitter.

Posted by Heidi Tolliver Nigro on September 27, 2008 | Comments (0)