Followup to this Pit thread. Anyone here work in publishing? Do you know?
It’s fairly significant. What a lot of publishers do now is just cut and glue to the spine, a process called “Perfect Binding”, which is the way that paperbacks are done. So the cost is a binding machine, the paper, print, some board and cover wraps, and some glue. It’s pretty much the cheapest way to make a book.
There are several more traditional methods for binding hardcover books, usually stitching together blocks (section of signatures) and ideally stitched to a floating spine (not the hard spine of the book).
But, the sewing doesn’t have to be done by hand, does it? Doesn’t automation reduce the cost somewhat?
No, but a machine that glues spines you can get for a few thousand dollars. A machine that sews costs more, plus adds a step or two to production.
Also, bear in mind, the cost differences are part of an equation based on the production run. You can now make a single copy of a book, with a perfect bind, in the $20-100 range, depending mostly on size standards and the fanciness of the cover. No idea what a single sewn book would cost or even if it could be done. My dad’s company did a copy of a specialty coffee table book and the COST was about $35/book on a run of a couple tens of thousands (oversized, glossy paper, lots of color photos). I guess I’m saying that there are a lot of variables in it.
Think of it this way: the publishing industry, in terms of mass production, has been hurting/hemorrhaging for years. A lot of what gets printed gets remaindered (marked down/unsold). If they can squeeze a few cents out of every book and boost their profit margins a few points, they will.
There is probably a market for people who love/collect books such that publishing houses could do special, boutique runs and add a premium to the cost of the books. I’d be surprised if no is doing this.
I had some special interest books printed in a fancier edition last year. For this version I had the pages printed and gathered into signatures (8 sheet or 16 page sections) and passed them along to a local bookbinding firm for sewing and binding. For binding 26 copies it cost $25 each. This included trimming edges, gilt lettering on the spine, two fabrics on the cover and a pasted label on the front.
How many did you have printed?
About ten years I was having a book printed by a local commercial publisher (although a university press was goind to distribute it). I got to talk to a rep of the printer’s. Here were the figures, as I recall (but the totals were exact). This does not address the question of buying machines, since the printer obviously owned both.
All prices in Canadian dollars (which were probably about US$.70 at the time). I was providing print-ready copy. I also gave them a pdf file, but in the end they didn’t use it. There was a fixed $3200 setup fee, independent of the number of copies printed. Each copy printed was $5 in addition. Had I been willing to allow my deathless prose to appear in quick-dying glue, it would have cost 4.50 a copy instead. Had I insisted on hard covers, it was something like .30 a copy more, but I like plastic covers. So the total for 800 copies (of which about 550 have sold in ten years) was $7200 (paid by the university press) and it is sold at $45 a copy. I think the page total was nearly 500, incidentally.
So I would say the extra cost of sewn bindings is negligible in the total cost. Even for $10 mass market paperbacks it should be almost negligible.
Twenty-six copies. As this place is a specialty binder, it is all hand done. Binding one book cost $50 for a typical sized book (350 pages, 6” x 9”). The priced dropped to $35 each for ten books and $25 each for our run of twenty-six. (I think it got down to $15 each for larger quantities.) This was due to set up and learning process costs.
“Perfect Binding” is the name for glued books. Glues have improved tremendously from the time they used to dry up and crack. Many hardcover fiction books are glued today. Sewn or “smyth-sewn” books will lay flat. If you have a cloth backing in addition, they will open up even more easily. I got a quote from a professional printing house for 2000 copies of 5.5" x 8.5" at about $2 per book; sewn was $0.50 more. These are ballpark figures, depends on choice of paper, etc. Often sewn books are case-bound (hardcover). The sewn sections are called “signatures” and these signatures can be glued, so it is “sewn and glued” which you can also do an a softcover. With a specialty book you can go further and glue the signatures to a cloth and use hardcover (casebound) and the cloth backing separates from the spine to lay really open and flat.
There is, and they are. Many of the works of P. G. Wodehouse have been republished in a number of such “collector’s edition” series over the years, though none were ever complete. Most recently – and I believe these are still in print and possibly new titles being added – is the “Collector’s Wodehouse” published in the US by Overlook Press and in the UK by Everyman’s Library. The US and UK editions are identical, and are exactly as you describe proper hardcover books should be: sewn signatures in turn sewn to a floating spine; they are printed using a traditional typeface on good paper, and with traditional jackets. Nothing exceptional and they’re not expensive, but clearly targeted to the book lover and collector rather than the casual reader who’d be just as happy to pick up a new or used paperback.
I only have a few of them myself because I’m a Wodehouse nut and mostly collect original editions, and I don’t particularly like the jacket design, so I just use them to fill in gaps in the collection. I wish they’d done jacket replicas of original editions or inspired covers with artwork like Chris Riddell did for the Wodehouse titles in the older Penguin paperback series. But they’re really nicely bound and printed.