Hi, this is Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com.  Well the other day I was looking through an old report that was done in 2003.  I guess that’s old.  And it was called “Beyond Finishing”.  It was a report done by a class led by Dr. Twyla Cummings here at RIT on looking at various aspects of finishing and of course today we take it for granted that we can have online perfect binding, saddle stitch binding, even case binding in some cases and it has changed the very nature of on demand publishing because now book publishers don’t have to store things in warehouses.  They can have them produced on demand because the finishing was the missing link in all of that.

Well before all that happened, before we got good at online finishing of any sort Georgia Alexander, who used to be the editor of the Seybold Report lives in Pennsylvania in a small town called Swarthmore and he did a little booklet for them and he was able to get the whole thing printed Digitally of course and this is 1998 and so it was pretty easy to get it printed digitally or even copied if he had to do that.  That was simple, but then his problem was he wanted to have it bound, so first he wanted to have a laminated cover, so he had the cover printed out on a large sheet of paper.  Then he found sheets of lamination.  He peeled them apart, put them down on the cover on one side.  The other side is not laminated.  Then he took a ballpoint pen that had no ink in it and he scored it so that it would then fold so that it would now have the nice clean edge over here.  He now needed to put the book block, the pages inside the cover and affix it in some way.  So he found these little strips of glue that somebody sold and he put them into the binding.  Then put the pages in and put it on a hotplate and then put two bricks on either side to keep it together and the hotplate melted the glue and kept it all together.  Now his problem was he needed to trim the three edges and he did that with a band saw.  

Now again, in the early days we didn’t have easy ways to do one book at a time and George found a way, a very crude way of doing it, but a way and I saved this all these years with his letter about it by the way.  It is a collector’s item if you will, but today with the binding systems that are out there we have done amazing things from roll-fed systems that do transaction documents to sheet-fed systems that do books on demand to roll-fed systems that do longer runs of books on demand.  We’ve changed the very nature of the publishing industry and digital printing was an important part of that, but almost as important was the finishing, the systems that allow us to put it all together into a book or a magazine, a transaction document or whatever it may be.  That is the key to the future of the printing industry, integrated printing and binding.  And that’s my opinion.

The label business has been revolutionized by digital printing.