The Gutenberg Bible is every­where. I don’t mean the real bible, which I did actu­ally see when I took my daugh­ters on a col­lege tour of Yale last year, but the image of the image and the idea of the Gutenberg Bible, arguably the great­est pub­lish­ing rev­o­lu­tion ever, to the new age of e-​publishing. Even my old Kindle, now an old 2nd gen­er­a­tion model with pix­els miss­ing, proudly dis­plays the old press that made mass-​produced books pos­si­ble in its rota­tion of dead-​author portraits.

If you love the smell of new books, plan a vaca­tion to visit a book printer and bindery soon, lest they dis­ap­pear for good. The good news is that even as e-​books become ubiq­ui­tous, peo­ple still love the feel and util­ity of paper, but the bad news is that more and more books will be printed dig­i­tally instead of on large presses.

Today’s books are printed in two ways, either via off­set print­ing or dig­i­tal printing.

Offset print­ing means an image on an inked plate s trans­ferred (or “off­set”) to a rub­ber blan­ket, then to the paper. Most books are printed in a sin­gle run of black ink, but for four-​color print­ing jobs, the paper goes through four impres­sions: black, cyan (blue), yel­low, and magenta in com­bi­na­tions to cre­ate nearly any color. Extra plates can be added for cus­tom or even metal­lic col­ors. For large quan­tity print­ings, such as 2,000 or more copies of a book, this is the most cost-​effective way to print books. The labor-​intensive set-​up of the press, which involves mak­ing the plates, is the largest expense in off­set printing.

For the most part, color books and the larger runs of black & white hard­cov­ers are printed in Asia where both the paper and labor are less expen­sive, which means that it is at least two months between the time a book is printed, put on a boat, and arrived in U.S. stores. Basic paper­backs are still most often printed in the U.S. and Canada, and they take three to six weeks from the time the pub­lisher sends the final files to the printer to the time the books arrive on shelves.

Digital print­ing, how­ever, works just like your computer’s desk­top or laser printer — ink or toner is applied directly to the paper from a dig­i­tal image – no plates involved. The costs of this kind of ink and the equip­ment make the per-​copy price of the book higher than the price of each offset-​print book, but books can be printed in small quan­ti­ties on an as-​needed basis, sav­ing the need to keep inven­tory. Black & white print­ing is rea­son­ably cost-​effective, but the price of color print­ing at about $.10-.20/page quickly becomes unfea­si­ble for books larger than 24 pages.

Digital print­ing is not mak­ing an ebook; it is print­ing a dig­i­tal file as a reg­u­larly printed book. Almost all the dig­i­tal print­ers (and a few of the off­set print­ers), use a high-​resolution Adobe PDF file as the source for the printing.

There are two types of dig­i­tal print­ers: Digital Short-​run print­ers that will typ­i­cally print a few dozen to a few hun­dred copies at a time. These print­ers are great because they can offer qual­ity con­trol and cus­tom paper choices. With dig­i­tal short-​run print­ing, you can even com­bine color and black & white pages (and those color pages can be through­out the book and not in just one sec­tion.). Print-​on-​Demand print­ers (often called POD), such as Lightningsource, or Amazon’s Createspace, print books one at time, book after book. Each book goes through the same machine, so you don’t get much choice about paper. Because these machines are run­ning all day and all night, book after book comes out of them. All of the paper is exactly the same. Over the last sev­eral years, the qual­ity of dig­i­tal print­ing has improved sub­stan­tially. It’s just the run of the mill paper that makes it look the same, but many major pub­lish­ers are using print-​on-​demand ser­vices for their older or more obscure books. It’s quite likely that you’ve recently read a digitally-​printed book and didn’t rec­og­nize the difference.

Once books are printed, they are put together as block, and cut to the right “trim size,” and then they are bound. For good-​quality hard­cov­ers, the sheets are sewn together which cre­ates a loose, pli­able spine. It’s sturdy, and rare that the pages in a smythe-​sewn book will fall out, and sewn bind­ing is a rec­og­niz­able mark of qual­ity. Paperback blocks are glued with a pli­able glue. Then the cov­ers are applied by machine.

These print­ers can print and send any book in a mat­ter of days, but the amaz­ing Espresso machine prints both any book and its cover on the spot, cuts it down to size, and binds the book in a mat­ter of about 10 min­utes. Espresso machines are appear­ing in book­stores and libraries with greater fre­quency — it’s almost as good as an instant down­load, and with a glass enclo­sure that lets you see what it hap­pen­ing inside, almost as good as a field-​trip to the bindery.

the Espresso Book Machine