Question about yearbook printing

[astockglausner]

I own a large photo studio and we currently use a lab for our printing. However, I just won a contract for a very large yearbook production. I'm new to this so I'm outsourcing the printing to a professional yearbook company. I'm curious as to what kind of printer I would need to buy to print yearbooks on my own. They are professional, military yearbooks so quality is extremely important. Will be producing at least 30,000 of them per year.

Also, if you know how much money I will need to spend that would be great. I'm not sure if you can give a cost per page or something like that. The books are all 9x12. I would initially outsource the cover for sure because it is hard bound and not something easy to make starting out.

[effeegee]

It's a buy don't make decision. Particularly if you use a lab now particularly.

Even at 30,000 a year of a multi-page book it would not be realistic to set up true quality controlled, colour managed service which prints and binds hard back photo books. High quality binding would be a serious investment which would be essential to make a decent fist of it. Concentrate on the 'pipeline' control aspects to keep service and quality to standard you need to have a fallback position to ensure continuity in case of any disruption.

[Enrique]

I'm sorry but how did you bid on this contract when you don't even know how much you're going to put into it? How did you come up with the quote? This doesn't make sense to me.

[Amubabe]

@ astockglausner - where are you located? We do yearbooks at our press every year for quite some years now, nowhere in the volumes that you are looking but I might be of some help.
let me know