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>Elna Tymes writes:
>
I'll repeat something I learned some 15 years ago, when I was
> writing books for
> major publishers: after beau coup focus groups and other studies the
> publishers discovered that ordinary readers REALLY DON'T LIKE
> 3-ring binders,
> and they REALLY DON'T LIKE books that are bigger than the 7"
> x 9" size.
I personally agree. I hate binders. They take up too much
space, both on a bookshelf and on the desktop. You can't
easily flip through them like a book. Drop one and you'll
spend the next 20 minutes re-collating and reassembling
the beast.
And those updated pages? They almost never get put in the
right place in the binder. At best, they are stuck in the
back of it.
> One of the major arguments against perfect-bound books is
> that they won't lay
> flat on the desk. Guess what! There is a binding (suitably
> called "Lay-Flat")
> that separates the actual spine of the book (the place where
> the page sigs are
> literally bound together) from the printed part of the cover
> that wraps around
> the spine. Thus when a Lay-Flat-bound book is dropped onto a
> desk, it will
> open to a miscellaneous page and stay open and flat. And it
> turns out that
> most book printers know how to do a Lay-Flat binding and that
> its cost is only
> slightly more than a regular perfect binding.
We used this lay-flat binding for our larger manuals.
It works pretty well, but not as many vendors are set
up for it. The vendor we use now isn't.
Steve
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