Perfect in the short run: Low volume, high quality books printed in hours

How often have you come out of a conference, a seminar or a training meeting clutching a set of stapled handouts run off by the presenter or event organiser?  If you were lucky, they might have even been held together with a plastic spine! Where are they now? The odds are that they stayed in your briefcase or on your desk for a few days or weeks before you filed them in the bin! It’s a sad fact that many excellent events are often let down by the quality of the materials that delegates are given to take away. For one thing, second rate material diminishes the value of the content delivered; for another, it makes it less likely that it will be retained for future reference.

Of course, the reason why handouts are often produced ‘fast and dirty’ is because content – or parts of it at least – may not be known until very close to the event – or perhaps even while it’s still taking place.  But if that’s been your excuse up until now, you can’t use it any longer, because thanks to digital printing and our perfect binding machine, we’re able to create book quality documents in a matter of hours.

The perfect binding process uses hot glue to fix pages together, and the end result is a professionally bound book or booklet that’s almost instantly dry and ready to go out of our door as soon as it comes off the machine.  Creating content pages and covers using our digital press, and then feeding these into our perfect binder, makes it possible for us to be receiving artwork in the morning, and delivering high quality books by lunchtime.

Combining digital print with perfect binding is ideal where a fast turnaround is needed, and using this production method gives us the ability to be incredibly responsive, printing virtually in real-time. But speed is not always the driver – there are plenty of other reasons why you might require low run, high quality print including:

•           Impressive presentation documents for an important meeting.
•               A limited run academic publication.
•               A self-published book, printed on demand.

If you need to produce a professional looking book or document, this process is fast and cost-effective for anything from just one copy - up to a print run of several hundred. Books and booklets are usually printed in A4 or A5 format, as these are the most economic sizes for our digital press, but we can go up to a maximum size of 350mm x 350mm if required. The size of the content should not be an issue either as we can produce books up to 50mm thick.  For a really impressive document, it may be worth considering printing the cover using the lithographic (rather than digital) process. Even if the content is not going to be available to print until the last minute, covers can be litho printed and finished in advance so they are ready to go when the content is finalised. The same principle can be applied to any other elements which might be available in advance, or require special finishing; this might include diagrams, illustrations or photographs for example.

So next time you need to produce low volume, high quality documents quickly, don’t break your desktop printer or burn out the photocopier, call Holywell and do it properly. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing Holywell!

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