ROCHESTER, N.Y., Oct. 10, 2006 - One size doesn't fit all when it comes to Teacher's Edition books. So Xerox Corporation is launching a combination of digital technology and software to help print professionals provide textbook publishers and school districts with tailor-made textbooks. An industry first, the Xerox Teacher's Edition book solution provides a quick, cost-effective way to print short runs of Teacher's Edition books. The new offering meets increased demand for state- and region-specific textbooks driven by legislation such as the No Child Left Behind Act. This legislation requires schools to demonstrate educational effectiveness based on student performance on standardized tests. Because these tests vary from state to state, many school districts are recognizing the need for Teacher's Edition textbooks to be aligned more closely with the needs of their students. The Teacher's Editions - which include resources to help teachers deliver the materials - represent a strong opportunity for digital color print providers because teacher textbooks are produced in about one-twentieth the volume of student textbooks. Currently, the industry produces Teacher's Edition books in large quantities on offset presses, incurring significant costs for set-up, warehousing, and obsolescence, driving the cost per book as high as thousands of dollars. "Xerox's Teacher's Edition book solution serves a specific need in the educational sector," said Quincy Allen, president, Xerox Production Systems Group. "This new digital printing solution is the latest innovation from Xerox that helps deliver new value to customers, create new revenue opportunities for commercial printing partners, and drive page volume on Xerox digital presses." The Teacher's Edition solution runs on Xerox's flagship iGen3 110 Digital Production Press, a 110 page-per-minute digital color printer. A retrofit kit has been developed to modify the Xerox iGen3 press to run the lighter-weight coated paper required for Teacher's Edition books. The DocuSheeter iG roll-feed system from Lasermax Roll Systems provides the ability to continuously feed rolls of this light-weight paper into the iGen3 press. The Xerox FreeFlow DocuSP controller, coupled with the Xerox FreeFlow Application Series software for Teacher's Edition textbooks, enables print professionals to save valuable time, money and labor by streamlining and shortening the process of integrating individual, customized pages into a book. The traditional production method associated with Teacher's Edition textbooks is to have highly trained operators draw from a repository of thousands of single-page files. The workers then manually assemble the pages into a very complex file for each book - as many as 1,300 pages per book - taking days of preparation time for each book. The new Xerox Teacher's Edition software automatically pulls the correct pages from the repository into a single file and prints them in the correct page order. This eliminates the need to manually combine and separate the files, reducing operator involvement, errors and preparation time. "Being able to process all of the pages from one file has taken us from an average of 30 hours of prep time to approximately 30 minutes," said Christian Schamberger, director of operations, Mercury Print Book Division, Rochester, N.Y. "I cannot place enough emphasis on the competitive advantage that the Xerox FreeFlow workflow solution has given us against the typical operations used for traditional offset printers." Availability and Pricing The Xerox FreeFlow Application Series software for Teacher's Edition textbooks and the Xerox iGen3 Book Publishers Press Retrofit Kit, which enables the press to run lighter-weight paper, is available immediately in the United States at a list price of $59,000, through Xerox's direct sales force.