The present invention relates to a bookbinding method and its apparatus by using an electrophotocopying apparatus.
Generally, books are manufactured through many and complex steps including plate-making, printing, bookbinding and the like. Accordingly, the book manufacturing cost of one book is relatively high, when a relatively small number of books, for example, several hundreds books, are manufactured. For this, reason it is desirable to minimize the manufacturing steps and transferring of books during manufacture and, if possible, to automate its process under a computer control, for example. Many attempts to improve book manufacturing such as reduction of manufacturing cost and speed-up of bookbinding, have been made of which the following approaches are exemplary.
Firstly, a camera speed plate is engraved and the engraved plate is automatically loaded into a small type printing machine and then is subjected to printing, gathering and bookbinding steps. Secondly, by using a copying machine, an original paper is copied onto a usual paper and then it is subjected to the gathering and bookbinding steps. Thirdly, resin reliefs are prepared, arranged in a belt fashion and then printed and bound. However, these approaches suffer from many disadvantages. For example, the original paper must be manually exchanged. The plate member is costly with low printing quality.