James Belton, planning and solutions manager, stands alongside the new Digibook 300

Harrier LLC, digital printing photobook specialist, based in Newton Abbot, has announced the purchase of a DigiBook 300 PUR perfect binding machine from Morgana Systems.

The company houses a wide variety of finishing kit to produce photobooks and other digitally printed output for major high street and online brands. The company also prints for Truprint, itself a part of the Harrier LLC business.

The investment in the Morgana DigiBook 300 gives the company quality PUR binding for its larger product offerings, including XXL landscape books that can often extend to as much as 160 pages. ‘The Morgana product really hits the spot for our premium XXL landscape books. There really isn’t that much of a choice with regards to machines that can deliver a quality bind in that format,’ said James Belton, planning and solutions manager at Harrier LLC. ‘95% of our work is PUR bound – it provides the quality of bind that is essential for the digitally printed work that we produce.’ 

‘Having reviewed the machines on the market, and had samples produced on the front-runners, Morgana’s DigiBook 300 came out way ahead of the rest. The quality of the milling station in particular put it out in front. With digital papers it is critical to significantly roughen the spine in order to produce the strength of bind that our customers expect, and that these high quality products deserve. 

‘The small footprint of the machine was an added bonus as well – it doesn’t take up that much floor space. We generally only assign one operator to the machine, though we can increase the output at particularly busy times by adding a second.

‘Photobook products bound on the machine are typically runs of one, but can range in content from 20 pages up to 160 pages – that creates a sizeable publication. The side gluing capability of the DigiBook 300 is a big plus especially on larger page counts. It helps to provide that solidity of bind that we insist on and that delivers a product that is really going to last.’

‘One of the reasons that we had the sample books produced is in order to put the finished products on our ‘page pull tester’ to test the binding. We work to industry standard but the DigiBook 300 samples were so well bound that the test results far exceeded our standard expectations and in some cases actually went off the scale!’