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At Maple Press in York, PA, stories come to life with every page they print. In this Business Spotlight, we sit down with Andrew Van Sprang, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, to discover how this independently owned book manufacturer has been shaping the publishing world since 1901—and how Shipley Energy plays a key role behind the scenes.
From guiding energy transitions to helping Maple Press stay ahead of market trends, this partnership ensures that the presses keep running smoothly so readers everywhere can enjoy the books they love.
Watch the full video and read the transcript below to see how energy and innovation come together at Maple Press.
I’m Andrew Van Sprang. I’m the vice president of sales and marketing here at Maple Press.
Maple press is a book manufacturing company founded in 1901. We’ve been here in York, Pennsylvania the whole time, and by that we print and bind books. We do both paperbacks and hardcovers and a variety of different quantities from a single copy up to 50,000-100,000 copy runs. Generally speaking, we work with publishers. They will send in their files along with a purchase order. From there, we’re going to take a look at the files and make sure that everything set up properly, and then we template it so that it fits on the right machinery when we’re putting it through our manufacturing facility. From that standpoint, we then print the job and then it goes into the bindery. It either gets married up with a paperback, or it goes through as a hardcover.
We sort of have a facility here. It’s an all in one. We have one manufacturing plant, and this is it. I believe this this facility is 170 or 180,000ft². This facility allows us to have everything under the same roof. We have warehouse so that we’re able to bring in a lot of paper and other materials to be ready for the upcoming demand that we have, and not have to wait for any of those materials to arrive so that we can get books out quickly and on time for our customers.
We have gas, we have oil, we have electricity that we need here. And you guys help us in all aspects of that. But over the years, you know, we’ve transferred to different things as the different technologies have become available and the different efficiencies in those types of energy have been brought forth mostly because of consultation with Shipley. That’s what’s brought us to the next level every time we’ve made a decision. It’s because of consultations with Shipley that have told us that, hey, moving from oil to gas or what have you is the right move at this time and these are the trends, etc. We know we can trust in the research and the development that you’ve done as to what’s happening in the marketplace. It means that it’s an area of the business plan that we don’t have to be studying and figure out what’s next, because your team is helping us get through that and telling us what the trends are looking like and what’s the next best thing. Maybe we have a contract that’s going to come up and maybe it makes sense to renew it, or maybe it makes sense to stop it right now and get a new contract, depending on what the future might hold, that difference is very big to us.
We’re in a unique position in the marketplace, still being an independently owned company in a marketplace where there’s a lot of conglomerates out there. We can adapt and do things that our customers need with a couple of phone calls rather than, you know, getting red tape. I think that’s something that’s been very important for our customers. And it continues to be something that sets us apart.
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