Spiral Binding
Also known as coil binding, spiral binding makes use of plastic spirals or metal spirals to bound the cover and interior pages from the spine side. The plastic spiral is more popular. For the spiral binding, both round holed and oval holed drills are used. The coil is twisted after inserting through small holes in the pages. The holes are all punched along the edge near the spine of the book cover. Being an excellent choice for instruction manuals, reports, and directories, spiral binding is quite common.
The spiral diameters in spiral binding differ from book to book, depending on its thickness. As spiral binding has a hole drilled on the spine side, you must also see to it that the margin on the binding side is larger in comparison to regular perfect binding. Generally, the spine side margin is about 5mm larger than the cutting side margin.
What Are the Advantages of Spiral Binding?
Here are the many advantages of using spiral binding for your book –
Flexible page counts – With spiral binding, the page count is from 12 pages to 300 pages. For perfect bound book, the page count should be divided by 4. But spiral binding doesn’t need. You have no limitation of page count in 12-300 pages. You can get the coils in a wide range of diameters and you can choose them according to the thickness of the book. The printer will choose the coil diameter according to your book page numbers. The size of the coil is a very important factor when it comes to the aesthetics and functionality of the book.
Ability to open fully – A spiral binding book can lay flat and open with 360-degree rotation. You can open the book all the way back without ruining it in any way. The book will also take very minimal space on any desk or table and this makes it the perfect choice for several items like directories, proposals, and even instruction manuals. You can also use this type of binding in travel guides so that you can manage them easily even while you are on the go. Another great advantage of their ability to fully open is that there will be no information that gets buried in the innermost corner.
More kinds of choices – With spiral binding, you get a number of color choices for the spiral or coil. If you are choosing a plastic coil, then you can choose just about any color that you want or a color that matches your professional theme.
Pages turn without obstruction – You can rotate the pages around the coil with minimum or no resistance at all. So, there is no tension among the pages that are bound by this method as compared to the other methods. Moreover, the pages will stay put and you do not have to take the hassle of holding the pages in order to view the contents.
Readily Available – This is one of the easiest methods of binding because it practically does not require anything apart from the coil. There is no hassle of sewing or gluing. The process is thus very straightforward. This also makes the process perfect for shorter production runs.
Spiral binding offers a perfect choice for music books, manuals and a number of other documents.
What Are the Disadvantages of Spiral Binding?
Most things that come with many advantages also have a few disadvantages. So, here are a few disadvantages of using the spiral binding method for your book –
- When compared to perfect binding and saddle stitch binding, spiral binding is expensive and not as budget-friendly as the two.
- When it comes to the production time, spiral binding can take quite a long time to complete the production in comparison to other binding processes like saddle stitch binding or perfect binding.
Out of all the softcover binding methods, spiral binding occupies the position of the third most popular technique. At QinPrinting, we have been doing spiral binding for several years and we excel in this process. If you have any questions in your mind regarding the procedure that we follow or what materials we use in our spiral binding technique, don’t hesitate to call us or send us an email. Click here to get free templates or contact us to get free templates now!