This is what most people think of when the think of book binding. Wire-O is a bit more proprietary and less common so sometimes it can cost more. It just has a different look and some people prefer its look over perfect binding. Wire-O is another type of flat book binding using the same principles as coil binding. It’s good to mention that with folded books you have to create books with page counts in multiples of 4 where as with flat books you only have to do in multiples of 2.Ĭoil binding is more expensive than saddle-stitching but is more versatile and has its specific purposes.

The thickness of the book is virtually unlimited as well. Combined with plastic or leatherette covers and backs these books can last a lifetime.

They lay completely flat when opened making them great for reading and writing in. With saddle stitched books sheets of paper are folded on top of each other and bound which is why they’re considered “Folded Books”. Coil bound books are part of a book binding category called “Flat Books”. These books are nice and have their purpose. A machine punches a row of holes along the edge of the book and then has a plastic coil fed through it. Coil BindingĮveryone has seen a coil bound book. The image above shows the difference between the effects of standard saddle-stitching (left) and squarefold saddle-stitching (right) on an otherwise identical booklet. You get the cost effectiveness of saddle-stitching with the look of a more expensive book binding. This allows you to create larger page counts in saddle-stitched books without them becoming unruly and bowing. This allows a saddle stitched booklet to look and behave more like a regular book. It’s saddle-stitching with a compression process at the end which forms a square spine. Squarefold saddle-stitching goes by a few different names (Square spine, Square edge, Lay Flat) but it’s all the same. Even though they CAN do up to 200 pages you don’t want to do more than 100 pages because the books will suffer from “bowing” making the books look bad and not lay flat. Most booklet makers can only stitch together a 200 page booklet maximum and that’s with very lightweight paper. Saddle-stitching is generally the most affordable book binding method and is used for smaller booklets. A stitching machine essentially makes and cuts its own staples out of raw wire and is used for more rigorous applications like in commercial printing. Stitching uses a spool of wire, stitches a length of that wire down through the sheets of paper and back up through the other side. Stapling is taking a pre-formed piece of metal, like the staples you put in your desktop stapler, and binding pages together. There’s a technical difference between stapling and stitching. The chair back is your saddle and instead of stapling we call it stitching.

Then you took a stapler and stapled the sheets together along where you folded them. Imagine you folded a bunch of paper in half hamburger style and stacked them on top of each other on a chairback. I’ll use the term booklet from now on but know that the terms are interchangeable for most purposes. Publishers print books and so they use that term. In commercial printing we say booklets because most of what we print are… well… booklets. Booklets are more reference material whereas a book is built in a way that’s meant to be read through and through or at least referenced more heavily. I think it’s better to think of it in terms of purpose. That makes more sense but is a little loose. Others say the difference is simply the number of pages books having a large amount of pages. However, there are many softcover books out there. Many say that a book is something that is bound with a hardcover. In printing we often use the term booklet instead of book and the definition difference is different depending on who you ask. Posted on December 20, 2017, and filed under Design, Binding.įirst, let’s clarify what a book is.

Stapled binding