A system for combined mailing of a plurality of diverse publications to a plurality of recipients at an optimized mail rate. The system includes a bindery for binding a plurality of the signatures where the bindery binding the plurality of signatures creates a plurality of first publications and a plurality of second publications. Each of the plurality of first and second publications are in a unique order, where the unique order identifies each of the plurality of first publications and each of the plurality of second publications with each of the plurality of recipients. A co-mailer is part of the system for combining the plurality of first publications with the plurality of second publications to form a plurality of diverse publications. The co-mailer merges the plurality of first and second publications in the unique order to send the plurality of diverse publications to the plurality of recipients at the optimized mail rate.

A method including assembling printed products to form a first mail stream on a finishing line, providing a second mail stream of printed products to the finishing line, and combining the first and second mail streams on the finishing line.

A system and method for merging and printing multiple postal presorted print jobs into a single print run for discounted rate mailing. The method includes merging mail recipient address lists from several print job orders into a merged recipient address list. The method further includes associating printing content provided by a print job order requestor with each recipient in the merged mail recipient address list. The method also includes printing mailpieces in a presorted sequence by selectively applying associated printing content for each mail recipient in a presorted merged mail recipient address list. Accordingly, several small targeted mailing print jobs, each individually too small to qualify for mailing discounts, can be merged into a larger, presorted print run collectively eligible for mailing discounts.

A sorting system may include a sorting apparatus coupled to a programmable control system which is configured to actuate the sorting apparatus so that it assembles similar products for packaging in an arbitrary, user imposed order or selection bias. In preferred implementations, a user may activate a biasing protocol pursuant to which items bearing certain images appear with a disproportionate frequency on the top of a stack of items such that the selected images are the most common images viewable through a transparent product packaging. In certain implementations, empirical sales data is used to determine weighting factors used in the biasing protocol. In still other implementations, a more specific ordering protocol is imposed by a user such that some or all of the sequence of items in a stack or collection is arbitrarily imposed.