Inline Book Production · Naresh Bedi · Horizon International · IGAS 2022

At IGAS, Horizon showed twenty-one end-to-end solutions, and one of them was demonstrated to INKISH by Naresh Bedi. The setup is as follows: A content printer – in this example, cover and content printers are from Ricoh, but it could be almost any printer. The content printer prints the content on typically SRA3 size and deliver these to a gatherer that batch the sheets into a book block. The book block consists of as many ‘ups as you have on the sheet, and the next stage is to cut the collated sheets into book blocks of the approx size of the book (bleed size as a minimum). The second similar line has printed the cover, and both are matched using QR codes before being fed into the BQ-500 binder. The cover is fed directly into the cover feeder section of the BQ-series, and the content is taken by a robot arm, first measuring the spine size, and hereafter the book block is inserted into the BQ500.

Now the glued book is transported to the HT300, a one-knife-three-side trimmer enabling fast book-of-one production. As you can see in the film, everything is automated and requires minimum effort from the operator – a truly cool solution!