P Sajith, director market at Welbound said, "The book print industry in India is building capacities to cater to the growing demand of educational books – for domestic consumption as well as exports. This is reflected sufficiently by the capacity building book printers across the country." Sajith is eyeing the 18,000 to 19,000 publishers who produce a volume of around 80,000 to 90,000 books a year. After the US and UK, India ranks third in the world for English-language publishing.

The national capital region (NCR), also the capital of book printing in India, is leading the drive. A multitude of folders, six clamp machines and three knife trimmers have been installed by the book printers from this region. Anil Kumar, regional manager at Welbound said: “We have been seeing the demand coming in from all segments: textbook printers, publishers, book-print exporters and exercise notebook manufacturers. It is also gratifying to see that the market is evaluating the products on strengths of reliability, quality of output and application support”.

"Commercial printing is seeing a slowdown; however there is no dearth of book print jobs. We have seen leading commercial printers, across India, increasing their bookbinding capacity", says Mayur Bharate of Welbound. "Publishers want a variety of jobs to be turned around, faster than before; hence the preference for WB2000 binders"

According to the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), the publishing industry is growing at a rate of 30%—a trend aided by the opening up of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the publishing industry, up by 100% from 2000. Almost all of the multinational publishing companies have a presence in India now, but the bulk of Indian publishers are family-owned, small-scale businesses.

"This trend should boost the number of installations in NCR. The emphasis is clearly on the quality of the end product plus turnaround times", said Anil Kumar.

The Welbound team is available at the Pressline stall Hall H1 / Stall H14/01.