Binding: Perfect Bound

What is Perfect Bound Printing?

Perfect bound books are inexpensive and provide a durable, high quality, professional book. Perfect bound is the ideal choice for books with higher page counts (28 pages up to 2 inches thick). Perfect binding gives you a soft cover bound to the individual inside pages with strong, yet flexible PUR glue, creating a printable, square spine.

During the perfect binding process, printed sheets are gathered into a book, one on top of the other, the edges are ground off, the book is glued into a wraparound cover, then trimmed to size. Because of this gluing process, creating the square spine, the pages do not lay flat while you are flipping through them.

Perfect bound book printing is great for directories, magazines, manuals, year books or any type of booklet that has many pages. Our soft cover perfect bound books provide a high quality and professional look that can’t be matched.

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Forest

Page Count

The minimum number of pages is 28 pages to 2” thick maximum. 2 page increments are required when ordering.

When saving your print-ready PDF file, please save one single PDF file which contains your individual pages, including front and back cover, consecutively ordered. For example:

Design Tips

Gutters

Because perfect bound books cannot lay completely flat without breaking, there is a portion of each inside page that will lose visibility into the spine. This inside gutter can take up between ¼” and 3/8” of each page. Be mindful of this while designing and add an extra ½” cushion to the binding-side margins of each page of your perfect bound book. For more about setting up your margin and safety lines, click here.

Note: If you are adding page numbers to your project, then do not put them on the inside of the pages close to the spine. You will risk losing visibility.

Crossovers

Crossovers are images that span two adjacent pages. These are not recommended inside a perfect bound book due to the gutter phenomenon discussed above.

Spine Width

A unique feature of perfect bound books is the ability to design the spine if it is larger than 1/8th inch. You can keep it a solid color, add text or have one continuous image covering the front cover across to the back cover. Determining your spine width depends on your number of pages and the paper stock you have selected.

Download Perfect Bound Spine Calculator

Available Sizes