Managing director Ian Taylor said: "We wanted to generate work for our digital press, and we saw short run book printing as the way to do that. But if you are sending work out to be finished, you aren't doing it very quickly."

The Yorkshire-based company bought an HP Indigo 5500 three-and-a-half years ago and has been doing its finishing in-house ever since, including bookletmaking and laminating.

Since the purchase, the company has predominantly taken bookbinding work from existing customers, but it is now also marketing the service to potential new businesses.

The single-clamp autoset perfect binder has a speed of 500 books per hour. Standard features include automated cover scoring and job memory storage.

Colour Options employs eight staff and has a turnover of £750,000.