The Henkel-Welbound Book Days will be a specialised gathering of book publishers and printers, who will explore the best new ideas for innovation and growth. Enabled by Henkel and Welbound, the events hosted at PrintPack 2019 will be practical and collaborative. The aim is to tap into the renewed optimism in the book sector with publishers, printers and designers. The latest theme – Growth For All – is all about the book's potential to transform the publishing world and drive new growth. This will mark the beginning of a series of activities and events through the year to celebrate Books For All, that will take transpire in important book hubs across India. "Books for All is an attempt to build a much more unified structure," Pallippuram Sajith, director of Welbound Worldwide P Ltd says. "Some say the book industry and book publishing structure is fragmented and in a world where clients want faster, better, cheaper executions. We want a book print firm to ensure it is possible." Team Welbound's aim through Book Days - Books for All is to re-kindle the joy of the printed books and drum support in its mission to provide "faster, better, cheaper" books for publishers and readers. This will be possible through three weapons in Welbound's ever-growing armoury: technical knowledge; respect for content and how to organise it in the best possible manner; and above all, unite the creative and production functions in a way that hasn’t been done for decades. Sajith says, "People expect relevance these days. And so, you must speak to each person in the shopfloor or on the editorial desk in a unique way. During PrintPack we will create a special booth wherein users can have success to simpler versions of techs-specs and tech-kit. Plus we are creating chat-points which can relate to everyone from industry veterans to millenials." Each and every day at the PrintPack show will see ... - Book about Book Days: A souvenir that celebrates past 20 years of Indian book printing, book awards plus the plans for the year. The plans include: special events for printers and publishers in their cities and localities - The launch of E-utilities: Apps that will help you resolve issues, train team members and address customer requirements - Facebook Live: Book interviews with leading book printers which will be conducted by the PrintWeek India Welbound Worldwide is bullish about books. And along with the thousands of book print factories across India, the company is "excited" about helping clients and harnessing a robust ecosystem plus that create a labour force that knows how to produce the best books at the lowest cost. Welbound will unveil seven knowledge-sharing projects from 1 to 6 February A quick introduction to the mobile book testing lab - that can be set up easily at any place The importance of fundamentals. Emphasise the quality and cost-effectiveness of binding which starts and ends with planning. How to build strong books, more cost effectively Meet the book specialists. Confabulate with India's top brains in book manufacturing planning, bookbinding, adhesives, machines and maintenance Prize-winning contest - Guess what! - Grain direction, GSM, Page Pull Value, Adhesive coat layer and a lot more Practical workshops to grasp the relationship between paper, bookbinding machine, adhesives and the quality of binding. Be ready to be surprised New Gen Smart machines that will communicate with you and boost your productivity What do you want to know about book printing: Answer the questionnaire completed that will provide you with all relevant information and also help us build a service platform that will answer your questions - real time, at the touch or swipe on a smartphone

The Impel-Welbound team at PrintPack 2019 Rushikesh Aravkar catches up with Sajith Pallippuram of Impel-Welbound at the 14th edition of PrintPack India. What is the star product of Impel-Welbound stand? We are showcasing the WB@4000 12-clamp perfect binding machine. This is the first 12-clamp perfect binding machine manufactured at our Bengaluru facility. I would describe this machine as flexible and expandable. Flexible because, the user has the choice of using different gluing systems – cold glue, hotmelt EVA, new-generation ultra adhesive, and PUR. The different gluing systems require different set up. We have provided a system where one can switch from one gluing method to the other seamlessly. And expandable because? This machine can be coupled with our high-speed gatherer and also to an inline three-knife trimmer. How does this help the customer? The Welbound Technical Services team has been involved in installing and servicing several imported secondhand 12-clamp perfect binders. What we have observed is, when a user makes this switch from a six-clamp machine to an inline binder, there a steep learning curve. It involves understanding the signature, how they are processed in printing and binding stage — are the signatures kept under pressure, are they stacked. This is especially true when one is switching from manual gathering to inline automated gathering and inline binding. As a result, though the machines are equipped, the user is not able to derive the expected throughput out of these high-speed machines. Moreover, it also results in higher energy consumption and the wastage of consumables like adhesives. So, even if the secondhand machines are affordable, the price per book is pretty high. We have seen a series of our own customers who have invested in such machines in the past and have suffered in the process. So, the customers who are making this automation switch are looking to start with a high-speed binding machine that would allow books to be fed manually at the initial stage. And as they grow they are willing to add to the automation. That’s where the WB@4000 fits in. It produces 4,000 books per hour. It is a EPIC series of WB Impel-Welbound binding machines. EPIC stands for efficiency, productivity, intelligence and cost-effectiveness. Explain EPIC. How does one achieve efficiency, productivity, and cost-effectiveness? For these things to improve, one needs to have the information on what happens when you are running a book, or you are changing a book, or when a machine is not maintained, or when the machines are not cleaned properly. These kinds of things have impact on costs. We have put energy meters in the machines which gather information such as costs incurred when the machine starts consuming more energy because one is idling the machine or when one is not running the machine at a higher speed or because the knives are blunt or because the glue tank was not cleaned regularly. We have realised that we need to work with the book printers in order to have a continuous improvement of cost efficiency. The areas that we can look at are: one is machine, which will give you the throughput productivity and minimise wastage. How does this make the machine intelligent? The machine makes the information available to the user to act upon. It's a one way communication from the machine to the user in a readable format or to the user’s ERP. The information can be delivered in the form of an email or an SMS or you it can be downloaded in MS Excel format. This information can be used to figure out if anything is going wrong in the machine or to find to the root cause of a problem in the machine. It definitely can be used to improve efficiency and productivity. Does it also tell you if the quality of a book is good enough? An inspection system cannot work only by systems. It required expert people to use the available data to make inferences and make right decisions. With WTS programme, we are educating everyone who's involved in bookbinding to understand how to test a book, how to look at the things which can go wrong and also then trace it back to the root cause if something is incorrect. There’s no point in trying to make corrections at the end of the process. One needs to go trace the issue back to the planning stage and make amendments there because root cause can be in grain direction or folding or any intermediate process. There are methods of visual inspection, there are methods of testing a book, and then there also in-process inspection. At this exhibition, we are promoting the entire concept of testing your books well. This includes a page-pull tester, glue-level measurement devices, digital and analogue thermometers. We are also showcasing that with right adhesive in right quantity and right spine finishing can provide better quality and spending lower costs. This is an eye-opener for many customers who have visited our stand. The page-pull tester is the only way of measuring the strength of a binding. We have created this tool and we are selling it with our machines at a subsidised cost. This helps the customer will be able to give a number to the quality that he produces. The third important cost is adhesive. Our partnership with Henkel has been over 25 years now. It has allowed us to introduce the best of adhesives technologies that are adapted to the Indian scenarios. So they form a crucial partner in the process. With efficient machines and processes and services, the idea is to ensure that we are delivering the right quality at the lowest possible cost. Our aspiration is to help the entire supply chain bring down the cost of books. This cannot happen overnight. It needs change in the way people work. We will play that significant part of working with all the stakeholders in continuously reducing the cost and providing better books. How many installations of EPIC bookbinding machines? We have supplied 60 six-clamp WB@2500 machines. This also includes exports to Bangladesh and African countries. We have been able to meet aspirations of the customers with this new model in terms of 35% more productivity. We have made the temperature control digital so that it’s easy to use. Plus the nipping is able to handle up to 500gsm cover with accurate and adjustable creasing. The at-the-rate (@) symbol signifies that these machines are internet-ready, they are talking to you through emails. Is the bookbinding industry in India ready for smart automation? The biggest cost in bookbinding is labour. Moreover, signature gathering is a highly-skilled job. It is getting difficult to get skilled labour. So automation is inevitable. Smart automation with a human face is what we need. There are certain things that are better done by human hands so as to achieve good quality, probably at a lower cost than what it would be.

Gaurav Agrawal of G-tech Print Works Mathura-based G-tech Print Works has recently invested in a WB@2500, the new model of six-clamp binder from Welbound. According to Gaurav Agrawal of G-tech, the new investment has given the company the advantage of higher speed and better quality. Run by the father-son duo, Anil Kumar Agrawal and Gaurav Agrawal, G-tech Print Works prints government text books, NCERT books, guides and question banks, work books, etc. Its target customers include all government departments, PSUs, and publishing houses, with the state education department being its biggest customer. Working from two swanky units in aggregate 35,000-sqft covered area, Agrawal said the company’s USP is the fastest turnaround of books. In this, the new WB@2500 has been a great help. Agrawal said, “All our perfect binding jobs are done on six-clamp Welbound machines. The recently installed WB@2500 has given us advantages of higher speed and better quality. The machine also provides us detailed information on the daily production, which is very important while working in a highly competitive environment.” While Agrawal is proud of the works G-tech Print Works has done over the years, he said the company is especially proud of its association with the MP Text Book Corporation, Bhopal. In another big project, G-tech Print Works printed around 8.91 lakh copies of the book Seekhne Ke Pratifal for Sarva Siksha Abhiyan Uttarakhand for 2018-19. The company also supplied school books to Haryana state within a tight deadline of 45 days. Mathura is one of the largest textbook print production centres in the country. Textbooks of various state governments, be it north, east or west, get printed in this town. “As reliability of machines and prompt after-sales are of utmost importance to remain competitive, book printers in Mathura always rely on us. The father-son duo of Anil and Gaurav Agrawal has reputation for keeping deadlines while delivering quality,” Ramakant Singh, Impel-Welbound's regional manager for North India, said. Anil Kumar, Impel-Welbound's national sales manager, added, “We are proud of our customers in Mathura, like G-tech Print Works, who produce textbooks for state governments cost-effectively and ‘in time’, so that our children can have affordable education. In the coming days, appropriately named ‘Book Days’, we will celebrate such achievements."

Sanjay Goel of First Impression Noida-based First Impression Corp Services has recently installed the Welbound six-clamp WB@2500 binding machine. According to Sanjay Goel of First Impression, the reasons for investing in the machines were the specifications of the models and the company’s tech support. “WB@2500 is a great machine to have. It’s more productive, more capable and quite state-of-the art. In the last three months, we have already done more than 1 million books using the machine, and when the HMI of the machine announced this, I was proud that we bought this,” Goel said. Established in 1993, First Impression Corp Services is into educational books, coprorate brochures and exports, and targets national publishers with pan-India presence for books and multi-national corporates for their brochures and catalogues. With in-house pre-press to post-press under one roof, according to Goel, the USP of the company is quality production with fast turnaround and quick deliveries. “This makes us invest in brand new machines with reliable support from manufacturers, like we have done for Komori and Welbound,” he added. About Welbound, Goel is particularly impressed with its after-sales support. “What differentiates Impel-Welbound from many other suppliers is its after-sales support. Often, you hardly meet the sales executive once the sale is completed. In the case of Welbound, however, the sales executive remains the single point contact to get any requirements, in both services and technical support,” Goel said. Working in a 50,000-sqft covered space, the company has the production capacity of 50,000 to 60,000 books within 24 hours. Explaining how the installation of WB@2500 has helped the company, Goel gives the example of a book with a 500-gsm board cover, with inline feeding and cover scoring. “This was not possible in the older model of binding machine that we have, a WB2000, and we thought we may have to manually place the cover. Then the Welbound team ensured us that this can be done using the new WB@2500,” he said. Among big volume jobs, the company has produced 1.5 lakh books for exports in a week, from printing to binding. It has also delivered 10,000 books in less than 24 hours, from printing to binding, to Goyal Brothers Prakashan. Top publishers in First Impression’s roaster include S Chand, Goyal Brothers and Rachna Sagar, among others. Corporate clients include Syska LED and DCM, among others. According to Anil Kumar, Impel-Welbound's national sales manager, First Impression always creates a great impression with its customers, be it for out-of-the-box thinking, near-impossible delivery periods or for desired quality standards. Sanjay Goel leads from the front and is always available for his customer's to address any of their requirements; and in-turn, we enjoy working with a customer who will challenge our notions and help us stretch our limits,” he added.

Satish Borade of Creative with the new machine Mumbai-based Creative has recently installed a Welbound six-clamp WB@2500 binding machine. This is the company’s second Welbound machine on the shopfloor. Creative was started by Satish Borade in 2010 with a two-colour machine and a pre-owned perfect binding machine. Since then, the company has grown to install a Welbound six-clamp machine in 2017, followed by the second investment recently. Borade said speed, safety and much better quality were the reasons for choosing the new WB@2500 binding machine. He said in the last couple of years, the company has seen a substantial rise in volume. “Previously, we were doing 20-lakhs books a year. But last year, we did almost 70-lakh books,” he said. In the current year, the company is aspiring to cross the one-crore mark. Creative’s target segment is publishers. The company produces 40 to 50-lakhs books in a year for Chetna publications. It is also planning to produce 40-lakhs books this year for Balbharati, the Maharashtra State Board. Working from a 15,000-sqft shopfloor, Creative runs three four-colour machines from NBG and two perfect binding kits from Welbound, trident trimmer machine, and pinning and cutting machines, among others. This year, the company also invested in a pre-owned Heidelberg sheetfed machine. Borade said the USP of his company is on-time delivery and quality product. “There are factors that determine on-time delivery. These include machinery and its vacancy, efficiency and productivity,” he said. Borade is proud of what the company has able to achieve. He said, “In the last one year, we produced almost 70-lakh books, which was a challenging task. But we managed to print and bind them all on time, and that too, in-house, and too, without any defect or rejections.” Shakti Nadar, area sales manager for Impel Welbound, said, "Creative is one of the fastest growing book printers in the west of India. Borade has years of experience in book printing before he started this company, and this reflects in his approach to book production — be it the perfect binder, adhesive used or usage of three knife trimmer for book trimming."

According to Nielsen, the Indian book market is worth USD6.7 billion. It is the third-largest English language market in the world, and many regional language markets are thriving. In the past 12 months, the demand for books has continued to climb. Pallippuram Sajith, director of Welbound Worldwide P Ltd said, “Over the full year, the Indian book industry has seen an uplift in terms of quantities, orders and run lengths. If 3-4 years ago, there was doom and gloom because of the advent of e-books and the impact of Brexit, it has become clear that a decline in demand for printed books is actually highly unlikely.” Sajith added, “The millennial parents want their children to have the touch and feel of books, and this has brought back colouring books and alphabet books back into fancy. The change is perceivable from the fact that the ‘children’s books segment’ is on the growth path.” “Printed trade-books in India, are on a path of double-digit growths”, mentioned Ananth Padmanabhan, CEO, HarperCollins India, in a closed-door publishers roundtable in Delhi. He explained that books are agnostic to economic and cultural changes. Earlier if we did not deliver books in time, people bought eBooks. With print on demand strongly established in the country, this is passé. This consistent upturn for books is great news for printers and an opportunity for them to educate publishers even more so about new finishes and techniques they can use to really make their books stand out on the shelves. The Henkel-Welbound Book Days is a gathering of book publishers and printers, exploring the best new ideas for innovation and growth. Enabled by Henkel and Welbound, the events hosted at PrintPack 2019 will be practical and collaborative. The aim is to tap into the renewed optimism in the book sector with publishers, printers and designers. The latest theme – Growth For All – is all about the book's potential to transform the publishing world and drive new growth. This will mark the beginning of a series of activities and events through the year to celebrate Books For All, that will take transpire in important book hubs across India. The tangibility of printed books and the ability to experience them through multiple senses – sound, smell, sight – is often cited, and evokes far more of an emotional attachment. In addition, physical books can be seen as an expression of identity. The simple fact is that there’s nothing quite like a physical book to really engage with. Sajith concluded, “Educational books form the largest share in the graphic arts and printing industry. It is also our largest market. We have been on a continuous journey to understand the customer’s customer, help raise quality aspirations, bring in awareness about best practices. We have always tried to help our customers imbibe good management practices for their cost analysis and future investments. The printer/binder can add tremendous value to the printed book publishing chain”. At the 14th Printpack, the team Impel-Henkel-Welbound will be launching a new array of smart products and services – that will help the book printers be more efficient, productive, and cost-effective.” Henkel Adhesives, the global leader in adhesives and sealants will have their representatives from the paper and graphic Art business, in the Welbound stand. Some of the path-breaking hot melt and water-based adhesive technologies will see their India launch during this show. Also Guk-Vijuk, the technology leaders in paper folding machines for the pharmaceutical print industry will also be represented in the stand. Last two years saw the largest number of outsert folding machines being shipped to India. Nordson Corporation, another global leader in adhesives dispensing equipment will also be present at the Impel-Welbound stand. Henkel-Welbound program - Book Appreciation Course conducted by Team Welbound about book blocks, section sewing, folding techniques plus perfect binding. Suresh Maheshwaran Nair, the chief technical officer of Welbound said: “It took us many years of working closely with the publishers and printers to develop tools that will help the value chain put a “number” to the quality of bookbinding. At this show, we will display an array of solutions that will do to binding, what spectrophotometer did to colour management” - To host FaceBook Live Book Sessions, in which there shall be interviews of publishing heads at the Henkel-Welbound stall. These conversations will address the key points that emanated from the last roundtable, including recyclability and how to leverage paper; safety at the workplace; saying no to the use of single-use plastic; minimising waste during production and quality standards. The theme of these "Book Talks" is "The Enduring Appeal of Books” - Special lab testing and award competitions under the banner of Welbound Technical Services, which has managed most of the installations of pre-owned, European post-press kit that have been installed in India in the past few years. In addition to the audit, installation and commission of the adhesive binders, case makers and saddle stitchers, WTS also has undertaken high-value add tasks like retrofitting standard automation systems in lieu of proprietary ones in these machines. Aravind Kalasur, the director of WTS will oversee the process.