74 May / June 2024 - Issue 348 we’ve made job and format changes much easier and faster to complete throughout our bookletmaker range – allowing operators to concentrate more on the quality of the products being produced. “Despite shrinking print runs, demand for high-quality, personalised booklets is still high and rising.” Stand Out from the Crowd Elsewhere and Morgana Systems also acknowledges the demand for booklets, with Ray Hillhouse, vice president of sales and marketing for the Plockmatic Group Offline Business Unit, saying this is stronger than ever. “Our customers are certainly seeing growth in the demands for booklets of all shapes and sizes,” Hillhouse says, adding: “With the continued growth of digital production, end-users are recognising that short runs are now very affordable. Runs that might well have been prohibitively expensive to print on a litho press, because of the fixed pre-press costs, are now possible with digital equipment, where even a run of just a few copies is now quite possible. “Printers should always be keen to make their offering stand out from the crowd. In bookletmaking that could be finishing a product with a square back, or in the range of sizes that it can produce. Printers that fail to invest can easily find themselves missing out on orders because of a lack of finishing solutions available in-house.” As for what is available from Morgana, the manufacturer used The Print Show 2022 to launch its Morgana BM4000 Series of bookletmakers. These machines can produce both A4 landscape and 297 x 297mm booklets, with the ability to staple and fold booklets of up to 140 pages (BM4035) or 200 pages (BM4050). For those PSPs looking to bring this process in-house, Morgana offers the BM 60, which is billed as an entry-level bookletmaker that can saddle staple and fold booklets of up to 22 sheets of 80gsm paper, giving up to 88-page booklets to the user. Moving up, the BM5050 and BM3050 can staple and fold up to 50 sheets of 80gsm, as well as handle sheets of up to 620mm in length, to create booklets of up to 200 pages. Models are equipped with heavy duty and low maintenance stapling heads, also using 5,000 staple cartridges. For additional options, Morgana offers the BM5035S and BM5050S, both of which are equipped with the latest stitching head, giving operators the ability to adjust the length of the stitch for thicker books without using tools. Delving further into Morgana’s expansive range, the manufacturer supplies the Morgana PowerSquare 224VF and 160VF, both billed as complete book-making systems for the production of offline books of up to 224 pages and 160 pages, respectively. Meanwhile, a second, perhaps more significant change, in post-press book binding has seen the development of short-run PUR binding products over recent years. Hillhouse says Morgana has led the way here with its DigiBook range, which features machines that he says offer a variety of production speeds to suit almost all print businesses. “The DigiBook is a truly innovative binding machine designed and built for today’s market requirements,” Hillhouse says, adding: “It is easy to use via a touch screen panel with icon graphics that allow the programming of all precision operations in just a few seconds, including start-up and shutdown.” The entry-level PUR product in the range is the DigiBook 200, suited to both litho and digital printers that require short to medium runs of PUR perfect bound books to a professional standard, and runs from a standard power supply. The machine can produce up to 200 books per hour. Also in this range is the DigiBook 300XL, which provides for up to 300 copies per hour, a binding length from 100mm through to 450mm, and a spine thickness from 2mm up to 50mm, and can also run from “We’ve already upgraded several customers to the DBM-700 because of the improvements to the last generation, but mainly due to the high quality of the square spine module and the fact that the range can now process 60 sheets/240-page booklets at high speeds, consistently and at very high quality,” Harry says. With this, Harry goes on to talk about the importance of investment in new bookletmaking technology, saying standing still in this market and relying on older, outdated equipment could mean degrading the quality of booklets being produced. “Quality will always play a huge factor in any finishing system, but because booklets are so commonplace, producing a poorly executed booklet or a run of booklets that are not consistent will damage both the brand of the printer and the customer,” he says, adding: “Since most designers don’t understand print, they don’t factor in errors in registration or take into account the difficulties of lining up pages, so a printer has to take extra care to produce a better-quality product so as not to enhance any mistakes from print to finishing. “Automation in booklet production adds to this. It helps the production remain consistent and highlights errors early on. This is increasingly important simply because the number of jobs at shorter run lengths are increasing and are the new norm – so www.printmonthly.co.uk iSaddle Senshi, Duplo’s new flagship booklet production system, launched in March ▼ Printers should always be keen to make their offering stand out from the crowd BOOKLETMAKERS
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