Big dreams for a small printer Troy -- Digital operation hopes expansion will help it compete with offset giants

The humming of industrial-sized laser printers churning out pages may not give traditional book printers pause yet.

But Integrated Book Technology Inc. in Troy is in the midst of a multimillion-dollar expansion that it hopes will chomp away at another piece of the traditional offset printer's business.

IBT is a digital book printer, pushing out small-run, custom orders typically of less than 750 copies -- usually trade, technical or academic works with titles such as "Elementary Sudan Arabic" or "Multivariable Mathematics."

With larger, faster machines, IBT expects in the coming months to increase the size of orders it can churn out cheaply to about 2,000 copies. That gives the printer the ability to go after the more potentially profitable first-run printing -- largely the domain of the big ink-and-steel printers.

"We do have the work out there, as long as we have the capacity to do it," said Jim Klein, managing director of government relations for the company, which is located off Campbell Avenue on Industrial Park Road.

This month, a crew is in from Germany installing a $2.25 million bookbinding machine that is 10 times faster than IBT's existing lines.

Feeding that hungry binding machine will be a new printer -- another multimillion-dollar machine that will spit out 2,400 pages a minute. That will work alongside the seven existing machines, each industrial-sized laser printers capable of putting out 300 pages, or about one book per minute.

When the expansion is completed later this year, IBT expects to nearly double its annual output and drive revenue to $10 million to $12 million this year, more than double just a few years ago.

"We pretty much created the short-run market," said William Clockel, chief technology officer, who has worked with the company since its president, John Paeglow III, created IBT in 1991. "We answered a need publishers had 10 years ago."

Through a partnership signed in the United Kingdom earlier this year, the company also can ship a book electronically to Europe and have identical copies printed there, trimming warehouse and transportation costs.

IBT next hopes to sign another printing partner to manufacture books in the Asia-Pacific region, its third largest market behind the United States and Europe.

"When we started out 13 years ago, we were two guys with a phone," Clockel said.

Today, the company has about 100 employees in Troy and plans to add about 15 more when it ramps up production.

IBT isn't alone in capitalizing on digital printing, as it is called.

The National Association for Printing Leadership, a Paramus, N.J.-based trade group, surveyed its members last year and found that many expected digital printing to account for a third or more of their revenue in 20 years.

At the same time, offset printers by necessity are getting better at producing smaller runs, said Frank Romano, professor of digital publishing at the School of Print Media at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

The average run today is about 3,000 copies, down from 5,000 a decade ago, he said.

"We publish about 70,000 new titles every year. And that doesn't count all of the books that are reprinted every year," he said. "And publishers hedging their bets: They don't know if a book is going to sell, so they're printing small runs and then printing off more if it does."