Indian book majors opt for Welbound's portable kit

Agra-based education books publisher Shivalal Agarwala and Company have added the PPT. "We always strived to provide quality content at an affordable cost so that it helps the rural Indian student to further his or her educational dreams. We use the best of authors, raw materials and produce books that not only help them understand subjects like force or friction but also stand the test of time," said Vivek Mohan Agarwal, the second-generation entrepreneur who manages the complete end-to-end production facility of Shivalal Agarwala and Company.

"Since you can measure the quality of your books now, a book printer can now strive to up the quality", said P Narendra of Pragati. "We are setting up a full-fledged QC lab in our facility and the first product that came to our mind is the Welbound PPT", says Manu Choudhary of CDC.

According to Suresh Nair, the chief technical officer at Welbound Technical Services and the designer of this product said, "We wanted to spread the installations across different parts of the country so that the word gets spread faster". Towns like Agra, Meerut and Mathura have seen installations of the PPT in leading publishing housing.

The Page Pull Tester helps the user to evaluate the quality of the bound book in terms of the force at which the binding may fail. Nair designed the device, inspired by the writings of Tony Clark who had described the page pull testing in detail in "Bookbinding with Adhesives"

Suresh Nair, the chief technical officer at Welbound Technical Services made a presentation on bookbinding in which he explained the factors that lead to a well-bound book at the Print and Beyond seminar held at Kochi. At that time he said, "the portable device enables a better understanding of the variables associated with bookbinding operation and confirms the effectiveness of binding in the book."

Nair added, "In perfect-binding, hot melt adhesive is used to join the book block and the cover ensuring a strong bonding. The efficiency of binding depends on several factors like the quality of spine preparation, consistency of glueing and the quality of adhesive used. The best way to evaluate the combined performance of all these factors is to measure the page-pull value of the bound book."