According to managing director Quen Baum, it will give small businesses the chance to offer PUR bound books cost effectively for the first time.

He said: "More and more people are accepting that PUR is the correct way to bind digital documents, particularly for photobooks. If you are charging £200 for a book you simply can't have it fall apart.

"In the past PUR has been too expensive for smaller businesses, it wasn't easy to use and the big commercial PUR machines need looking after. This machine is affordable and very simple to use."

The machine is available from just under £40,000 and Baum said it can actually be used to bind even very small quantities of books.

He added: "Larger machines need to run for a couple of hours, otherwise you end up wasting a lot of glue. But the 300 is a closed system, once you put the glue in you don't see it again.

"It operates exactly as a hot-melt binder. It has a nozzle system which only opens when the book is there, so if you want to bind five books in a day then leave it on standby you can. At the end of the day it needs ten minutes cleaning and the same again the following morning."

Although the machine has a running speed of 200 cycles per hour, Baum said that many of the customers using the machine could be binding 200 books a day or less.

The DigiBook 300 is available to buy now and Baum also said a larger machine would be launched in 2012.