Lightning Source — Electrified Book Production

Bindery operations are all near-line. “With our 12-hour window to move product from printer and cover printer to binder and out to trimming and shipping, we can’t afford to allow any one piece of equipment to shut down any other piece of equipment,” according to Marshall. He says they use barcodes on totes to move the book blocks among processes. Much of the bindery equipment, including its Duplo binders and Horauf three-knife trimmers, has been substantially modified by Lightning Source’s engineers and combined with extensive program logic control interfaces by the company’s IT department.