New binder rewrites the book on publishing – Print21 magazine feature

Griffin Press is one of the largest and longest-established book printers in the country. The Adelaide-based division of PMP is renowned for its Timson custom-built offset book presses but now it has taken the lead in high-speed inkjet printing with the first installation of the HP T350 digital press coupled inline with the first Müller Martini SigmaLine in Australia.

The revolutionary power of high-speed inkjet is a technology that promises to change the paradigms of printing. Ben Jolly, general manager at Griffin Press, says the T350 inkjet press configured with the SigmaLine is an ideal solution for book runs from a few hundred copies and upwards.

“With our Xerox book factory and the new HP T350 SigmaLine, we now have the best printing capability for very short run and longer run digital,” he says. “On average we can expect to get about 1,000 books an hour off the Sigma bind line, depending on page extent. Thicker page extent books, you would get less books, thinner you would get more. We might even see 1,500 to 20,000 books with lower page extents coming off it.”

Compared to the print-on-demand function of the Xerox book factory producing one copy through to a few hundred, the new book line fills the gap in production capacity from a few hundred to a few thousand copies, while the fleet of three Timson book presses run books off by the thousands to a million or more.

“With our mix of print-on-demand, short-run digital to long-run conventional print, we have the best solution to provide products for publishers requiring books for the Australian market.”

Not just for pleasure

Griffin Press specialises in the ‘read-for-pleasure’ sector of book printing, books that are more than likely to be picked up and read in leisure time. To accommodate the set of standard book and trim sizes in that market, it is set up to produce those sizes with both conventional and digital machines.

“We have bought in digital presses primarily to meet the needs of the read-for-pleasure market, which is looking to extend the life of publications through making them available via smaller print runs,” says Jolly.

However, that is not the only suitable publishing application for the digital machines. “The nature of digital presses is that they are not format restricted like conventional presses are. Given their flexibility, this has enabled us to produce some educational and professional books for various new customers. As a result of this we have received a lot of interest from publishers in those sectors.”

This scenario suits Griffin Press ideally as, traditionally, the peak season for educational publishers is different to those in the read-for-pleasure sector.

Staffed with a crew of three, the T350 and Sigma binder were installed inline to perfect bind books as they are printed. Jolly believes the machines running inline will be more labour efficient, offering greater control over wastage and print numbers.

Pictured: Books from beginning to end with the HP T350 and Müller Martini SigmaLine binder.


“It seems to be the most cost-effective way to produce a book. However, to do this, you need the right equipment running at high productivity levels. This is why we have chosen he HP and the Sigma, both highly productive and proven pieces of equipment,” he explains.

“The Sigma line is a highly-automated piece of equipment, but while each component of the Sigma line is linked it does require a short make-ready. Despite this, it is configured in such a way that the press will run continuously, and once the bind is ready and starts production it will catch up on the books that the press has printed but haven’t been bound.”

The inline solution that Griffin specified was required to pick the paper off the back of the press, fold it, collate into a book block, bind it, trim it and stack it.

“Müller is the vendor who can provide all of those components and offer a complete turn-key solution, and given our long-standing relationship it was a very attractive proposition for us,” says Jolly. “And given that they have these running in multiple companies around the world, in our opinion it’s a benchmark for those processes.”