Archive for April, 2012
Perfect Bound
Thursday, April 12th, 2012
We have a lot of inquiries from oversea and they keep asking for thread sewn binding. After a while, I start to ask them why they are not using perfect bound instead. Perfect bound has the advantage of lower cost and faster production time. Their answers are very consistence. They don’t trust perfect bound from their pass experience. Once they open up a perfect bound book for a few times, some pages may come off from the book. It is a very serious problem for A4 size books if using heavier paper. If they start to press the book on the table and lay it flat, the spine may actually be broken into pieces. Then, I start to understand why there is almost no perfect bound inquiries from oversea. For local customers, we can demonstrate our strong perfect bound books so that they have no problem with perfect binding.
In fact, many China’s factories still have problem producing proper perfect bound book so that they offer only thread sewn binding. Some of our customers have the experience of telling a China’s factory to do perfect bound. But the result is still thread sewn books. They simply cannot handle perfect bound at all.
Simple perfect bound is really not sufficient to hold on to the pages tightly. Since this binding is simple and cost-efficient, people don’t want to give up this kind of binding. It is later improved and called notch bound. The sections are notched to allow the glue to penetrate into the section better. Thus, each page is strong enough to hold the entire book even for the thick ones. However, when we talk to the clients, we are still using the term “perfect bound” as it is commonly used among clients.