Somerville, Mass. & Rochester, N.Y., Nov 20, 2007 - Ames On-Demand recently accomplished something no other print provider has: it printed more than 3 million pages in one month on a single cut-sheet digital production color press. The custom book publishing company produced the record high volume on one of its four Xerox Corporation iGen3 110 Digital Production Presses.
As a producer of customized Web-to-print digital books, primarily for use in the higher education market, Ames On-Demand achieved the milestone - 3.3 million pages - in August during a peak four-month period of all-out effort to get textbooks ready for the fall academic semester. During this time, Ames On-Demand printed more than 22 million pages on its four 110 page-per-minute digital color presses. The typical iGen3 press user averages around 400,000 pages a month.
"We are having dramatic growth in our digital color book output and expect it to increase from 20 percent of our overall business today to almost 50 percent in the next few years," said Steve DeForge, president, Ames On-Demand. "We work the iGen3 presses hard, but they are very durable and reliable, and they deliver fantastic image quality."
The company produces more than 600,000 color and black-and-white books a year. DeForge expects print volume to hit 50 million color pages by the end of 2007 and grow to 80 million color pages by the end of 2008.
"Volumes like those produced by Ames On-Demand highlight the productivity and cost effectiveness of Xerox's iGen3 110," said Jim Hamilton, group director, InfoTrends, a leading independent research firm. "These results show how Ames-On Demand's innovative custom book publishing application is a perfect partner for the iGen3."
In order to meet the demand from book publishers, Ames On-Demand, a full-service digital print provider, added three Xerox iGen3 presses this year, after installing its first press in 2004. The extra capacity helped Ames On-Demand ramp up production volumes, with the majority of jobs being books with customized content, produced using a proprietary software solution that compiles "books on the fly."
The software, paired with the Xerox iGen3 press, allows higher education instructors to easily compile book content via a branded Web site, where they can pick and choose the curriculum, add their own or third-party content, get an estimated cost and then have their job printed. The software also helps education publishers facilitate all copyright clearance and reprint permissions. The company has been able to adapt the solution for other types of print jobs including training manuals for the financial services industry and graphic-intensive pharmaceutical directories.
"Ames On-Demand's success story is an example of a customer running its Xerox iGen3 press to the upper limit of its monthly volume capacity," said Quincy Allen, president, Xerox Production Systems Group. "We also have customers that are very successful producing profit-generating jobs at lower monthly print volumes, from 250,000 to 2 million pages."
Xerox is the industry leader in the number of pages produced on digital production color presses, with its flagship Xerox iGen3 Digital Production Press and DocuColor Digital Color Presses producing more than 13 billion 8.5" x 11" (A4) equivalent impressions in 2006.
According to estimates by InfoTrends, Xerox's installed base of DocuColor and iGen3 presses accounts for approximately 50 percent of the total 2006 worldwide page volume printed by high-speed production color printers. InfoTrends determines page share by using the independent, industry-standard definition of impressions, which is 8.5" x 11" equivalent impressions. This includes both color and monochrome pages printed on color devices.
Ames On-Demand's Xerox iGen3 presses are powered by Xerox FreeFlow DocuSP print servers. They also leverage Xerox FreeFlow Makeready, Xerox FreeFlow Print Manager and Xerox FreeFlow Scanner 665s, software and hardware that maximize productivity and improve efficiency by reducing prepress time, enabling late-stage editing, automating print management with load balancing and enhancing image quality.
Even with the increased focus on color, Ames On-Demand's black-and-white printing business continues to thrive. The company has produced high-quality black-and-white books and manuals for almost 10 years using six Xerox DocuTech 6180 Production Publishers. According to DeForge, the company will produce 93 million black-and-white pages by the end of 2007 and increase to 100 million pages by the end of 2008.