The new Heidelberg offset press will be fully operational at the company’s State Street plant in Ann Arbor, MI in mid-January.

The company also announced the acquisition of a new Kodak digital NexPress, the company’s fourth, also for the State Street plant, as well as a Xerox iGen 4 for its Oxnard, CA digital book production facility.

President and chief executive John Edwards told PrintWeek that book printing in North America, including trade and educational, had been doing well of late in part because global trends were finally working in their favor.

"The big one is that a lot of the offshoring that was going on is now coming back," he explained.

"Publishers were sending work over to China in huge quantities back in the early 2000s, but several things have happened such as pricing in China going up in part because the dollar now has more parity.

"The other thing is that runs are getting shorter and the publishing trade industry is trying to chase demand, so they want to have short runs and quick replenishment, and you can’t do that from the Far East."

Along with that has been an increase in publishers looking to add 4-color for more than just ultra-short run work. Edwards, who is the fourth generation to run the family business, said: "We’re primarily a one- and two-color printer, but the pricing on 4-color has come down enough so it’s possible to do things you couldn’t do in the past."

He added that publishers were also reacting to consumer demand for printed books that were as vibrant as an electronic screen.

"We’ve seen some opportunity for 4-color in the mid-range run, and that’s sheetfed," Edwards said. "So with 4-color printing it’s kind of the opposite of other part of the industry where you start on offset and migrate to digital. Our binderies on the offset don’t care if it 2-color or 4-color books, it’s a book to them, so printing 4-color offset gives up more things to do."

Edwards Brothers Malloy was formed by the merger of two Ann Arbor-based printers, Edwards Brothers and Malloy, in February of this year.

The deal that created the fifth largest book and journal manufacturer in the United States with 900 employees and $115 million in annual sales. The combined company has eight digital print locations in the US and another in the UK.

Even before the merger, Edwards Brothers had expanded its footprint by joining up with UK-based CPIgroup, Australia's Griffin Press and Asia-based Markono Print Media in their gps, (Global Print Solutions) initiative.

The goal of gps is to provide publishers with a single local supplier for sales and service, whilst also having the ability print books, often is very runs as low as 20 books, in markets thousands of miles away.

"The gps model is working really well," Edwards said. "It’s still growing and there are a lot of things you have to manage. It’s not just the printing, it’s the currency, it’s the shipping - for example in the US, there are 26 different ways to send a package and all the other markets have different shipping solutions that we’re learning and trying to manage. In some case the freight is more than the printing."