Boston, MA, March 4, 2008 – Ultimate Technographics, www.imposition.com, the innovator of book production software, has been recognized at this year's ON DEMAND Conference & Exposition with a Best of Show award in the Workflow Solutions category for its Impostrip Book Stacker 2.0.  

Impostrip Book Stacker 2.0 won for its unique concept of automating and optimizing the production of digital books, photo albums and photo printing.

InfoTrends, a leading market research and consulting firm in the digital imaging and document solutions industry, partnered with the ON DEMAND Conference & Exposition to produce the awards program.  The ON DEMAND Conference & Exposition is the world's leading digital printing conference and exposition, encompassing all of the technologies that are used to create, manage, personalize, print and deliver content. 

Impostrip Book Stacker revolutionizes the way to produce digital books. It was designed to make parallel book blocks of variable length on a digital press to minimize cutting and folding; and optimize paper and impression time by putting the maximum number of blocks together without any operator intervention. Impostrip Book Stacker 2.0 is a major step forward in automating the production of photo album books and stacks of photos for photo labs. It secures per job profitability for digital book printers and publishers increasing the number of short runs and reprints. Key new features:

- 3D optimization of the stacks to automatically place similar size stacks side-by-side and inserting blank pages to even the stacks.
- XML job ticket automation from web2print photo album systems like DigiLabs and IP Labs.
- Banner Sheet automatically generated and inserted between stacks to identify each of them. Banner Sheet can contain custom information including barcodes so each stack can be easily tracked and identify to insure delivery to the right customer.
- Barcode output on each sheet and each stack to drive Duplo cutters for automatic cutting of the stacks.
- Imposition of the JPEG format and the automatic resizing and grouping of JPEGs into stacks.
- Timed printing so jobs can accumulate for optimization and be printed usually at night.

In the Spring issue of Innovate Magazine, Joseph Madlener at PrintManagement in Ohio is quoted about saving significant production time by using Book Stacker to produce book blocks and eliminate needless cutting and stacking of thousands of books every week. "This way to produce books was not efficient enough and was causing us to lose about 50 hours of production time a week. By using Impostrip Book Stacker we were able to regain this lost production time. Our new application and workflow allows us to process PDF files to Impostrip Book Stacker so they can be imposed and sequenced based on page numbers and north/south orientation. This process allows us to reduce paper waste and the amount of time required in our bindery department. Book Stacker is able to process and impose very large PDF files. This result was critical to our workflow."


Joanne David, Executive Vice President of Ultimate, who accepted the Best of Show award on behalf of Ultimate, said: "We are honored to receive this award. When Ultimate invented digital imposition 20 years ago, our first users were offset book printers who immediately saw the value of Impostrip. For digital print we had to completely rethink the optimal workflow for on demand book production. Today digital book printers are embracing Impostrip Book Stacker because it makes business sense. They can now capture new business like photo books, albums and calendars knowing that Impostrip Book Stacker 2.0 is designed to meet their new requirements to automate the production of these books from web2print to finishing."

Ultimate launched Impostrip Book Stacker 2.0 at On Demand in Boston, exhibiting with its partners: Ricoh-IBM Infoprint Solutions Company, Duplo, HP and Xerox.