Amazon’s local make-on-demand book printing facility a win for schools, authors

WEST COLUMBIA, SC (WOLO) — At Amazon’s make-on-demand printing facility in West Columbia, a book can be manufactured from start to finish — in less than a day.

Just over 300 employees make up the team at the CAE3 plant on Old Wire Road. Their combined efforts create around 60,000 books from scratch — every week.

“From the point of order to the point of manufacture, our goal is to accomplish that within 15 hours,” says Operations Manager Adam Channell.

The process of receiving the order, printing the book’s interior pages, making the cover, binding them together with a special glue, and checking for any defects — all happens at this location.

And the facility is only one of three across North America capable of creating on demand hardback book covers.

A majority of its clients? Schools and local up-and-coming authors.

“Being able to produce something for a local school and know that it’s going to provide for not only a teacher but also a student in their development or just in the better advancement of their lives is a huge success for us as Amazon at CAE3, not only on a broad scale but also that it’s a local school — just right up the street,” says Channell.

Including nearby Congaree Elementary — with Amazon donating 500 test books and supplies to the school.

“Having a tangible book — it matters. One of the first things we do is pick up a book. We want to teach our kids how to hold a book from the early stages as babies. They’re not always going to have a device, but they will have this right here. We have a lot of great writers at our school and we have a lot of talented authors that are in our building and in our school in Lexington Two,” says Principal Christopher Dickey.

“Having a book is very personal. Sometimes people like it on digital, but we still have a really high demand for the physical copies of the book, both on our soft cover side and our hardcover side, and that’s part of the reason we’re going through the changes that we are to increase the ability to have that capacity,” says Site Leader Sonia Bobinac.

Future upgrades are expected to double the facility’s hardback printing capacity to 100,000 books a week.

Bobinac also says any local student or teacher authors can print their personally written books for free.

“We have a lot of different business lines, a lot of different facilities, but I have to say, that make on demand — that we actually make something here — is very special.

Kindle’s direct publishing site through Amazon can be visited here.