Small Publisher setting up for Digital printing

[jakeknotts]

I am new on here and would appreciate some feedback.

I run a small non-profit publishing house in Eastern Europe (Ukraine) and am quickly realizing that digital publishing is where we need to go. We plan on printing up to ten titles next year, usually print between 2,000 - 5,000 copies, and have all of our cash tied up in offset printing.

I would like to move towards printing digitally, printing 100-200 titles at a time, and expand our number of books printed each year.

I would also like to move towards a more long-term sustainable model by taking some orders from other small publishers who like us would no like to be printing offset.

A publishing friend recently switched from offset to digital and is printing with a risograph but I am very unimpressed with the quality.

Having read through PrintPlanet's forums, I am learning but still very new and green and would like to hear what some of you think as far as moving towards obtaining equipment to print ourselves.

I would like to in the beginning have color covers printed by local printers and just be printing the body of B&W books. I need to get a printer, a binder, and a guillotine, from what I understand.

What equipment would you recommend I look into purchasing to try and get set up for around $40,000? Is it even possible? If I buy used equipment could I fit into this price range?

KM?
Xerox 4112?
Binding solutions?
What would it cost to get a reliable guillotine that could cut sheets 64cm wide?

I understand this is super broad, but any info would be appreciated so we can research more and move in this direction.

[UnlimitedBT]

здравствуйте,
если возможно, дайте, пожалуйста, телефон, по которому с вами можно связаться

[Mark Flanders]

Greetings,

You have a project on your hand. Good good. You can do it for 40K, but you might want to consider running shorter runs of your books...enough to distribute and show for sale on-line. Then fufill orders as you go rather than in advance. That is the advantage of digital. There is no cost curve in digital printing. It is a straight (diagonal) line...in other words the 1st sheet costs you the same as the 10,000th sheet. Be careful to fully test your binding system. many digital presses have trouble with the glue sticking to the toner and you end up with pages falling out. Fully test for this...though if you're printing primarily text you might dodge this bullet. Research book binding first, with this issue in mind. The cutter will be easy. Which press/copier to buy is up for debate. With your books you might consider running your b/w and jobing out the covers to someone with a good color machine (like an indigo) as it will be tough to afford a good quality machine after buying the other equipment. good luck!

Mark

[UnlimitedBT]

Interesting, jakeknotts, did you ever came back to read replies?
I am in NY but originally from Kiev, Ukraine and wanted to share what I know in your language but for weeks you did't act on your tread.....