If you love the smell of new books, plan a vacation to visit a book printer and bindery soon, lest they disappear for good. The good news is that even as e-books become ubiquitous, people still love the feel and utility of paper, but the bad news is that more and more books will be printed digitally instead of on large presses.

Today’s books are printed in two ways, either via offset printing or digital printing.

Offset printing means an image on an inked plate s transferred (or “offset”) to a rubber blanket, then to the paper. Most books are printed in a single run of black ink, but for four-color printing jobs, the paper goes through four impressions: black, cyan (blue), yellow, and magenta in combinations to create nearly any color. Extra plates can be added for custom or even metallic colors. For large quantity printings, such as 2,000 or more copies of a book, this is the most cost-effective way to print books. The labor-intensive set-up of the press, which involves making the plates, is the largest expense in offset printing.

For the most part, color books and the larger runs of black & white hardcovers are printed in Asia where both the paper and labor are less expensive, which means that it is at least two months between the time a book is printed, put on a boat, and arrived in U.S. stores. Basic paperbacks are still most often printed in the U.S. and Canada, and they take three to six weeks from the time the publisher sends the final files to the printer to the time the books arrive on shelves.

Digital printing, however, works just like your computer’s desktop or laser printer — ink or toner is applied directly to the paper from a digital image–no plates involved. The costs of this kind of ink and the equipment make the per-copy price of the book higher than the price of each offset-print book, but books can be printed in small quantities on an as-needed basis, saving the need to keep inventory. Black & white printing is reasonably cost-effective, but the price of color printing at about $.10-.20/page quickly becomes unfeasible for books larger than 24 pages.

Digital printing is not making an ebook; it is printing a digital file as a regularly printed book. Almost all the digital printers (and a few of the offset printers), use a high-resolution Adobe PDF file as the source for the printing.

There are two types of digital printers: Digital Short-run printers that will typically print a few dozen to a few hundred copies at a time. These printers are great because they can offer quality control and custom paper choices. With digital short-run printing, you can even combine color and black & white pages (and those color pages can be throughout the book and not in just one section.). Print-on-Demand printers (often called POD), such as Lightningsource, or Amazon’s Createspace, print books one at time, book after book. Each book goes through the same machine, so you don’t get much choice about paper. Because these machines are running all day and all night, book after book comes out of them. All of the paper is exactly the same. Over the last several years, the quality of digital printing has improved substantially. It’s just the run of the mill paper that makes it look the same, but many major publishers are using print-on-demand services for their older or more obscure books. It’s quite likely that you’ve recently read a digitally-printed book and didn’t recognize the difference.

Once books are printed, they are put together as block, and cut to the right “trim size,” and then they are bound. For good-quality hardcovers, the sheets are sewn together which creates a loose, pliable spine. It’s sturdy, and rare that the pages in a smythe-sewn book will fall out, and sewn binding is a recognizable mark of quality. Paperback blocks are glued with a pliable glue. Then the covers are applied by machine.

These printers can print and send any book in a matter of days, but the amazing Espresso machine prints both any book and its cover on the spot, cuts it down to size, and binds the book in a matter of about 10 minutes. Espresso machines are appearing in bookstores and libraries with greater frequency — it’s almost as good as an instant download, and with a glass enclosure that lets you see what it happening inside, almost as good as a field-trip to the bindery.

the Espresso Book Machine

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Want to know more? Email us at publish@booktiq.com to schedule a free 15-minute consultation.

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If you’d like to talk to us, send an e-mail to publish@booktiq.com to schedule a free 15-minute publishing consultation.