We thought you might be interested how the printing of the books from bookfabrik actually works. Today, we’d like to show you an overview of the process and give you an idea of how the production machines look like. There are obviously some differences between colour printing and black/white printing. The same is true for softcover vs. hardcover. The pictures below illustrate the process for a black/white sofbound book.

First we need paper. A lot of paper. The paper comes in huge rolls, essentially like giant toilet paper rolls. Just a bit heavier. The folks on the shop floor need a special forklift to actually move these rolls around and insert them into the printing machine. You don’t want them roll over your feet!

The paper is pulled from the roll by a paper feeding device. The feeder makes sure that there is a constant paper flow for the printing machine and that the paper never gets stuck – or worse – gets torn.

Next in line is the actual printer. Here you can see a device from Oce that is really top-notch for black/white printing. The machine prints several pages next to each other on the running paper, so some smart software first needs to layout all the sheets and then needs to control the later cutting and sorting stages so that it all fits together.

Depending on the climatic situation in the print shop, the paper needs to be kept at a higher humidity, so that it stays nice and flat. This is what the next machine is doing. If you keep the full room climatized well enough, you could do without that box. On the right, you can see the output from the printer with three pages laid out next to each other on the paper.

Now the paper is fed into the cutter. The cutter needs to be very precise in order to keep all pages in the final book well aligned. That’s why it needs special marks printed along the content of a page to adjust the cuttings down to a fraction of a millimeter. In the finished book, you won’t see these marks anymore as they’re cut away.

In the end, a sorter needs to grab all the different pages, collect them and put them together in the right order. They’re then compiled into need little piles, each one with a stack of individual books. All this happens at pretty high speed without anyone touching the stuff. The process obviously needs to be highly industrialized as otherwise we wouldn’t be able to offer our super low prices for prints of 1 copy only.

Nevertheless, a bit of manual labour is required in the end. The book blocks are taken one by one and fed into the binding machine. This machine automatically grabs the right covers and binds them to the inside of the books. The output on the other side is actually your book.

Of course, everything happens to the highest quality standards. Should you ever have a complaint about your book, please get in touch with us and we try to sort it out.

Your friendly feedfabrik team