One route into big margins is open-flat books. Practically anyone can get spectacular margins for an investment that can be well under £10,000. If you want to pay £40,000 or even £200,000, there are automated options that let you go into mass production.
Even before Gutenberg, there was a demand for prayer books and bibles that opened flat and once opened, stayed that way on a lectern. There’s still a need for those today as well as for more secular purposes such as car manuals, cookery books and sheet music books. Some of these still use sewn sections and techniques that Gutenberg would have recognised. Others use super-strong and flexible adhesives.
What really catches the eye though is a class of books that don’t just lay flat and stay flat, but they open completely flat across the fold. There’s no break, no gutter and images run seamlessly across the spread. You’re looking at a continuous page with only a subtle fold down the middle.
Originally invented as robust books for babies and toddlers, the technique was adapted for photobooks in the 2000s, as you can view images across the whole spread without the interruption of a gutter.
While the photobook sector has taken to open-flat in a big way, there are signs of wider adoption, says Lewis Price at Ashgate Automation. “We’ve seen a big shift in the last year to 18 months towards the commercial market,” he says. His company has sold the Finnish-made Maping range of manual layflat block assembly systems for more than 10 years.
“Originally photobooks were the big aim,” he says. “Now there’s a move towards higher value presentations, sales pitches, big tenders and so on, right into the fine art market, jewellers, estate agents, etc. Now people are coming into the market with more automated technology, but it’s essentially the same look.”
To produce these books you print single-sided sheets for each spread, then crease or fold them in half with the print side in. Each right-hand blank half is glued back to back with the left hand blank half of the next spread. This builds up a book block with no need for spine gluing or threading, which remains surprisingly strong and long-lived.
Thin card sheets can optionally be inserted between sheets to bulk them up and stiffen them. The folds make up the book hinges. A suitably constructed cover is attached, with hinges and gluing arranged so as not to constrict the block from opening flat. The Otabind method, with a loosely attached spine, works particularly well here.
You could just about assemble layflat book blocks manually in a home made guide frame, but a properly built system is very modestly priced.
A question of volume
The Fastbind Fotomount system sold by Ashgate uses peel-off adhesive sheets between the print sections. These are easy to use, but cost more per unit than liquid gluing systems. On the other hand the capital investment for manual layflat is a fraction of the automated gluing and assembly systems, so the choice comes down to the volumes needed.
Ashgate’s prices start at just under £2,000 for the smallest Maping Fastbind Fotomount, the F32, though Price says that nearly all users choose the largest model, the F46, at just under £4,000. That’s often bought with the largest of the Maping manual case-making frame, also priced just under £4,000, for a total investment of less than £8,000.
That’s pretty well all you’d need to to buy get going, since most printers will already have the necessary guillotine, laminator and creaser.
“Most people who buy layflat are new to the market and they don’t want to cut themselves short by getting a machine that’s too small, so they go for the largest,” Price says. “The biggest returns are on the biggest books. If you imagine an A3 landscape book, it’s far more valuable than an A4 portrait book, even though they’d take exactly the same amount of time to make.”
Price says that as well as companies wanting to test the water, the manual systems sell well for high-end bespoke work. “We’ve seen the commercial printers really getting on board. Hobs has just taken on four machines. We’re also working with some big chains.”
He says that a manual system is still relevant even if you have a high-volume automated system for layflat. “If you’re chopping and changing media and format, sizes, manual works well. In the automated system there are two leagues – the one above us is £50,000 or £60,000, then there are the big hotmelt systems that are a lot more. We have ours working alongside the big systems. Our pitch is the high-end, high-value bespoke work. You can take it to 20, maybe 50 books a day. If you are doing runs of several hundred a day then you’re going to want an automated system.”
Tarrant Machines is UK agent for the CMC-Italia range of book binding machines, which includes M-Flat, a manually loaded machine for assembling and pressing self-adhesive lay-flat papers to form blocks. This costs around £5,000.
An alternative system is made by Mohawk Fine Papers, sold in the UK by Premier Paper. Its i-Tone digital-coated paper is given a special pressure-activated Tru-Flat adhesive on one side. With this you assemble the blocks from folded sheets and put them in a hydraulic press to activate the adhesive. As with the self-adhesive method there’s no drying time.
While the Mohawk system was originally intended to work with manual assembly jigs, On Demand Machinery in the US developed an automated block assembler and showed it at Drupa 2012. It’s called Sidewinder and can make about 100 blocks per hour, up to a maximum open size of 675x362mm, and up to around 40mm thick. Sidewinder still needs a pre-creaser and a post-assembly press. Perfect Bindery Solutions, which is the UK distributor of ODM, hasn’t sold any over here, reports managing director Steve Giddins, though he says three or four have gone into US sites.
Fully automated liquid gluing systems that work with plain papers are much costlier, so you’ve got to be sure you have the volumes to justify them. There are two makers of automated layflat machines using cold glue, and two making hotmelt machines that are significantly more expensive. Swiss firm Photobook Technology makes the Mitamax series, which Duplo sells in the UK, while the Korean made Kisun Digi Binder DB-440 is sold by Tarrant Machines in the UK for about £60,000.
Photobook Technology managing director Kurt Richter says: “Cold glue has limitations, especially that it will not work with certain paper types that are coated with plastic so the water in the glue has nowhere to go.” Plastic coated non-absorbent papers include silver halide photo papers and some inkjet photo lookalike papers, he points out. In those cases hotmelt adhesives work better.
However, cold gluing is faster than hotmelt and the machines are less expensive, Richter points out.
“Our cold glue produces 70 sections per minute, 4,000 per hour. Hotmelt is 1,500. It’s the characteristics of the paper that require hotmelt, but the process is slower,” he says.
German manufacturer Jowat is also making dispersion and hotmelt adhesives for layflat applications. Imaging Solutions sells directly in the UK, with service support from Perfect Bindery Solutions. Its fastBlock hotmelt machine makes up to 100 blocks per hour starting with flat sheets. Alternatively, the fastBook-03 can be fed with pre-folded sheets and makes runs up to 80 blocks per hour (assuming 40 pages per block).
If opening flat and staying open is important, but the continuous image across the spread doesn’t matter, there is a new solution. For the past 20 years Franz Landen in Germany has been working on a very strong, very flexible water-based adhesive based on the stuff mussels stick themselves to rocks with. It’s now in production by Ribler in Germany, called Hydrosiv. It’s broadly similar to PUR glue but claimed to be even stronger.
Smart option
Smartflat books bound with Hydrosiv open and stay completely flat with no valley or gutter between pages. They are perfect bound, however, assembled from individual double-sided pages or folded sections with the spine end trimmed off and glue applied to the edge. So you don’t get completely continuous print across the seam and you see a thin glue line. With careful pre-press you can get a pretty continuous image if needed.
The German finishing manufacturer Palamides is just about to release the Smartliner 240, a single-clamp perfect binder that’s specially built to use Hydrosiv. Perfect Bindery Solutions will sell this machine in the UK, though other Palamides machines go through Friedheim. It handles A3 and A4 portrait or landscape books, up to 40mm thick.
Richter believes that the most important thing is increasing market awareness. “The layflat product is very attractive, but it’s not known in the advertising sector,” he says. “One of my neighbours is a big advertising guy in Zurich. I showed them to him and he was amazed – he didn’t know that this exists. Rather than get into the different technologies, I’d say just promote the benefits of layflat.”
