Superior Bindery addresses the changing demand of the book industry with digital printing and high-end book finishing capability
Superior Bindery is a family-owned business founded over 30 years ago as a trade bindery and finishing house for the graphic industry. Since then the company, located just outside of Boston, has grown. It now has a team of 160 employees, working in a 9,000 square-meter facility, to serve the printing industry with a wide range of binding, packaging, and finishing services.
Over the years, Superior Bindery has continuously invested in retooling the company by operating high-performance bookbinding machinery, increasing productivity and efficiency, as well as offering new services.
As a trade binder, Superior Bindery offers complete finishing solutions, especially for hard-cover books. They produce about 4.6 million offset hard bound books per year, of which 2.2 millions are thread-sewn, and 2.1 million Print-on-Demand (POD) hard covers in 2020.
Superior is known for its commitment to excellence and ability to always provide the highest quality.
Recently the company invested in a brand new asterPRO book-sewing machine to replace an older Aster™. Thanks to the many automatic features of the new model, which significantly reduces make-readies, Superior now produces a large quantity of high-end art books as well as trade books.
An important milestone for the future of Superior Bindery was the major investment made to address the changing demand of the book publishing market. With the creation of the digital division, Superior offers printing and finishing capability in short runs, leverages the POD business model, and offers Variable Data Printing (VDP) that enables the creation of personalized books in runs as few as a single copy.
“We are seeing a big growth in the world of self-publishers,” says Mike Hill, Senior Vice President of Superior Bindery. “Through our portal, we are receiving many orders from people who want to print their own books in short runs of 100 copies or less.”
