Almost every surviving book printer in the UK now has a short-run or on-demand service for monochrome books – such a service either subsidises the conventional printing service or is intended to take over from it within the next 10 years or so (or both). To service this growing sector, Muller Martini, moving with the times, has designed and built the world’s first dedicated reel-to-book production line specifically for short-run monochrome book printing.
The SigmaLine was launched as a concept at Drupa 2004. Very simply put, it consists of a reel infeed, a Delphax CR2000 electron beam imaging press, and Muller Martini binding and trimming equipment, all hooked up in a single line and made ready from a single, central operating console. It’s been in development at Muller’s Swiss headquarters for four years now, with the world’s first production model installed at academic book printer Bell & Bain in Q4 of 2005. “We were wanting a digital facility because our customers were wanting shorter runs than we could handle on our offset presses, but it wasn’t until we saw the Sigma that we found a digital press that could turn out a halfway decent quality of halftone,” says Bell & Bain managing director Ian Walker.
Total control
The SigmaLine centres around a SigmaControl desk that talks to the unwind, the press and the finishing elements of the line via JDF. The Muller components are all made ready via AMRYS, Muller’s fully automated control system, and throughout its progress, the book is tracked by optical sensors that guarantee the integrity of section on section, and cover on book block. The book is accepted by SigmaControl in a standard file format generated by any third-party imposition software (and the software itself can be supplied by Muller Martini). Working from the JDF ticket supplied with the file, the SigmaControl desk sends manufacturing parameters, including book size and cut-off, to the printer, cover details, glue length and side gluing to the binder, and book size and thickness to the trimmer.
After unwind and printing, the reel is sheeted and the sheets sent on to the SigmaFolder, which folds them down into 8, 12 or 16pp signatures and forwards these on to the binder where they are collated into book form (at the rate of 6,000cph) and the book block delivered into the binder clamp. Each clamp is individually addressable, says Muller Martini hardcover product manager and technical sales executive David McGinlay, “so the binder knows that out of a 100 run, clamp one is handling book one, clamp two is handling book two, and so on.” Under its hood, the SigmaBinder is Muller’s baby binder, the Amigo Plus, which binds at the rate of 1,000cph – more than fast enough for the Delphax’s output. It’s hotmelt only – at this level, there’s no call for PUR or cold glue.
The question of covers represents the SigmaLine’s only weak link: they can’t be printed inline. Unless they’re monochrome self-covers, that is. If you’re producing paperback books, and you want a laminated colour cover, you’re going to have to dedicate to the task a colour laser or even, as Bell & Bain have, a four-colour offset press. Covers need to be separately loaded into the binder’s cover feeder, where they get creased according to the JDF file’s spec and pulled onto the book after gluing. This carries the potential for some glitches: the number of covers loaded for a run needs to be precise unless the operator is specifically detailed to check and change the cover stack after each job. McGinlay reports that there are future versions of the SigmaLine planned that incorporate a colour facility, “and even whole SigmaLines for colour work – but that’s only going to happen once digital colour engines are up to speed. At the moment, to incorporate a colour printer into the line would slow it down dramatically.”
Following the binder, books enter into a Muller cooling tower. On exit, they travel into the SigmaTrimmer – a three-knife machine that uses a principle new to Muller Martini, and enjoying its first outing on the SigmaLine: three independently driven knives that cut sequentially the head, tail and foredge of books up to 40mm in thickness. It’s likely that the SigmaTrimmer’s sequential principle will remain a technology for small-format binders – this level of output barely stretches the trimmer, but it would slow down a faster machine. Delivery is a straightforward shingle conveyor: again, the level of output doesn’t require a dedicated stacker or bander, instead an operator picks and packs the books into boxes.
Despite what it says in the Muller sales literature, the SigmaLine is emphatically not an on-demand line – or at least, it depends how you define “on demand”. According to McGinlay, “you can do a single copy on it, but it would be massively uneconomical.” Instead, the SigmaLine is intended for short runs of 80 copies upwards; Bell & Bain reckons its breakeven point is “somewhere in the region of 100 to 750 copies”. At the upper end, though, it poses a serious threat to offset presses: McGinlay reckons it’s competitive up to 2,000 copies, depending on pagination. “The customers for this line will be the main book publishers who want to call off 10 or 20 or 40 copies at a time.”
Flexible concept
SigmaLine is flexible in concept, being designed to handle the widest possible range of on-demand book production. For instance, the Bravo binder can be replaced with a 6,000cph stitcher (based on Muller’s Prima) if the customer wants to produce saddle-stitched books. The line can also be supplied sans printer, should the customer have a requirement for processing reels pre-printed by another digital press. This last configuration is the easiest for Muller Martini to deal with, as it involves only Muller kit.
As McGinlay points out, it’s vital to SigmaLine users that Muller takes responsibility for all elements of the line, despite the fact that the printer is a third-party machine. “Printers don’t want to be contacting two sets of engineers, only to have them both blaming the other while the machine sits in the middle, still broken down,” he says.
Accordingly, Muller has drafted in expertise from Delphax to work with the CR2000 element of the SigmaLine; for future developments using other print technologies, it will similarly retain a staff of experts in those technologies.
McGinlay says development of the SigmaLine will continue, especially in the area of the print unit: “The electron beam technology was the fastest on the market when we began to develop this concept, so that’s what we chose to work with. Since then, other technologies have become faster and more reliable, and it’s entirely possible that we will end up with a SigmaLine that incorporates the print technology of the customer’s choice, whether that’s laser, magnetography or electron beam.”
But he remains in no doubt that the short-run concept is the way the book market is going: “Long runs have become short runs, and short runs have become on-demand – book printers are needing to reinvent themselves to cope with the demands of a very changed, and still changing market. It’s our role to support them in that, by offering technology that enables them to compete and thrive in these new markets.”
SPECIFICATIONS
Max size of finished book
• 310x225mm
Max book thickness
• 40mm
Stock thickness range
• text: 60-90gsm
• cover: up to 300gsm
Max speed
• up to 1,000 copies per hour dependent on pagination
Price
• £1.5m-£2.5m dependent on specification
Contact
• Muller Martini 0845 345 3588 www.mullermartini.com
THE ALTERNATIVES
On Demand Books Espresso
The Espresso is in a totally different league to the SigmaLine, but it is at least a self-contained book production line, plus it scores over the SigmaLine in being able to print colour inline. It’s basically a proprietary front-end controller driving a sheetfed Kyocera mono laser printer harnessed to a Konica Minolta colour laser printer.
Max size of finished book 279x431mm
Max book thickness 35mm
Stock thickness range 80-250gsm
Maximum speed approx nine books per hour
Price £53,000
Contact On Demand Books 00 1 212 966 3960 www.ondemandbooks.com
Xerox Docutech 6180 Book Factory
When Xerox says “books”, what it means is “booklets” – ie, stitched rather than bound, and with a fairly small maximum thickness. Like the SigmaLine, it centres around a mono printer (a Nuvera of various production capacities depending on customer requirement) and there’s no inline colour production facility for covers or book contents.
Max size of finished book 279x431mm
Max book thickness 5mm
Stock thickness range 60–300gsm
Max speed 180 pages per minute (approximately 60 books per hour)
Price not supplied
Contact Xerox 0870 873 3873 www.xerox.com
Muller Martini SigmaLine
In the UK, book printing is a troubled sector. One by one, the UK's premier book printers have seen their work drain away to China, India and the Middle East where labour is cheaper and quality is arguably comparable. Run lengths, as elsewhere in the industry, have also been eroded - the runs of 50,000-plus from two decades ago have typically become runs of 10,000 or less, and shorter runs have transformed into on-demand printing.
