The company, the UK’s biggest book printer, has bought five Canon Océ VarioPrint 6320s and one Océ VarioPrint 110 for its 60-staff Eastbourne site.
The machines will replace CPI’s fleet of Canon 6250s and offer a combined production speed of almost 1,700 A4 impressions per minute. The machines will also enable the company print different books and materials during a single print run.
General manager at the company’s STMA division, Martin Collyer, said the company was seeing “a significant shift towards a need for print-on-demand services”.
“We’re seeing a trend among publishers towards shortening the inventory cycle, where first impressions print conventionally and then the title goes straight to print-on-demand.
“Increasingly, titles are designed for print-on-demand first. It’s a shift that we are witnessing among customers of all sizes; from the large trade publishing houses through small and medium-sized publishers to self-publishers,” he said.
Collyer said CPI chose the VarioPrint technology to meet its need to produce books in high volumes in a very short run-times.
“CPI has to be agile to respond to the evolving demands of our customers, which is why we’ve invested. It’s part of an ongoing investment programme across the CPI Group in the UK to support all the markets in which we operate.
“Our reasons for choosing Canon were primarily reliability and efficiency, and that our operators already knew the machines,” he added.
The company also liked the print quality and high production speeds.
CPI is also upgrading its existing Océ PRISMA workflow to the latest version, v5, to maximise efficiency and minimise downtime.
Channel director, Canon UK and Ireland, Craig Nethercott, said the pace of the book publishing industry had completely changed “driven by communities such as university students. Publishers and printers must be able to respond to spikes in demand for certain books immediately.
"As a result, workflow that enables companies like CPI to dynamically and seamlessly scale up production with minimal downtime is becoming as important as the printers themselves.”
CPI UK has sales of around £100m, employs just under 1,000 staff and operates from six locations.
