We hear that sentence on the phone almost every day — and it’s our favourite kind of call. You’ve poured months into your artwork, your photography or your story, and now one decision stands between you and a printed book: how will it be bound?
This guide is the third in our getting-started trilogy, alongside Artwork Set-Up and Paper Choices. By the end of it you’ll know exactly which binding style suits your project — and how to design for it like you’ve done this a hundred times.
Congratulations — all three binding styles are genuinely on the table. Read on to see which one suits how your book will be read, sold and shelved.
Fast, light and budget-friendly. Spreads open completely flat, so nothing is lost in the middle. The natural home of zines, event programmes and slimmer photobooks.
Design for stapling →A square, glued spine and a thick card cover — the classic “real book” feel of paperbacks, magazines and catalogues. Your title gets a spine to live on.
Design for perfect binding →The keepsake. Rigid boards, endpapers and serious shelf presence for children’s books, cookbooks, photography monographs and special editions.
Design for hardback →Front cover, inside pages, back cover — all in a single PDF, single pages (not spreads), with 3mm bleed on every edge.
This is stapling’s superpower. Because the pages are folded and stitched rather than glued, a stapled booklet opens fully flat and nothing is lost in the centre. The full width of a double-page spread is yours to design across — a panoramic photo, an illustration that runs edge to edge, a bold headline straddling both pages. On a glued book, the middle of that spread would dip into the spine; on a stapled booklet it’s all visible.
One honest trade-off: the silver staples are visible down the side. Most designers embrace them — they’re part of the zine aesthetic — but if you want an uninterrupted spine, that’s a vote for perfect binding.
Here’s the thing nobody warns first-timers about. The more pages you add to a stapled booklet, the more the pages curl at the centre and push the booklet open — it resists sitting flat. We call it bounce.
And counter-intuitively, the smaller the booklet, the more pronounced the bounce. A rigid 300 or 350gsm cover on an A6 booklet (just 105mm wide) has very little width to bend across, so the cover fights the fold and springs open. The same cover weight on an A4 booklet has four times the width to relax over. Call it gravity, physics or paper technology — the stiffness of the card and the size of the page decide how neatly your booklet sits.
A high page count plus a stiff cover on a small format springs open on the table.
Every folded sheet makes four pages, so 30 pages simply can’t staple.
Pages nearest the centre jut out before the final trim, so they end up fractionally narrower.
When your booklet is folded and stitched, the right-hand leading edge is trimmed to leave a clean, neat finish. Before that trim, the pages nearest the centre naturally jut out further than the outer ones. The trim brings everything level — which means the centre pages end up a touch narrower than the outer pages. It’s millimetres, but if your page numbers hug the edge, you’ll spot the difference. Keep them comfortably inside the trim.
Yes — and it’s worth planning for. The more inside pages you add, the wider your spine becomes, and the more room you have for a title. Think about where your book will be sold: a shop, café or bookstore that displays books spine-out effectively requires one. A spine with even the tiniest bit of writing is more visually alluring on a shelf than a stapled booklet with nothing.
Keep important content a safe distance from the trim line. A word placed exactly on the page edge — like the “top” and “bottom” labels in our example cover — is a clever design element right up until the blade moves by a millimetre or two… and then it disappears off the page entirely. The same rule applies to content along the trim edge of your inside pages.
When your cover is glued on, the glue doesn’t stop at the spine. It grips 7mm of the inside front cover and 7mm of the first right-hand inside page (and the same at the back). Anything in that strip is swallowed by the hinge.
So keep content out of that zone — and ideally keep anything meant to be read (body text, logos, page numbers) 12mm or more from the spine edge of those pages. Images can run right up to it, but think twice before spanning a photo across the inside cover and page one: the middle 14mm of the image goes missing into the hinge, and lining up the two halves will demand your very finest InDesign acrobatics.
On every spread of a perfect bound book, the pages curve down into the glued spine. That valley is the spine gutter — and text and images get eaten there. A face placed near the middle of a spread becomes a “where’s his head gone?” moment; a sentence that crosses the gutter loses characters and stops making sense.
The spine gutter rule in one picture.
Here’s what that looks like in print. On the spread below — from our own binding demo book — the caption and the photo run straight through the fold, and the gutter simply swallows them.
And here’s the same challenge handled well. The subject sits confidently on the left-hand page, the landscape carries the spread across the fold, and nothing that matters goes anywhere near the gutter.
A white border frames an image perfectly — and gives your content natural breathing room away from both the trim edge and the gutter. Make borders a minimum of 8mm; 10–12mm looks great.
Your cover should arrive as one spread with the spine through the centre — back cover on the left, spine in the middle, front cover on the right. Not as single pages, and never tucked inside your inside-page PDF. You can find your spine size on our perfect binding set-up guide, or just ask us — and downloadable Adobe InDesign templates are available in our file set-up knowledge base.
Add 3mm of bleed on all four edges of your cover and inside-page PDFs. We say this so often we should get it tattooed — but if you’ve never printed before, bleed is a genuinely weird and alien concept, so let’s educate rather than nag: bleed is the extra sliver of your artwork that extends past the page edge, so that when the blade trims the sheet, colour runs cleanly off the page instead of leaving a white hairline. Our dedicated bleed video and the Artwork Set-Up guide walk you through it in minutes.
Send it over — a real person checks every file by hand, for free.
Exactly as with perfect binding: don’t put text right on the trim line. What reads as a clever design element in your layout file becomes a casualty with a small amount of movement on the guillotine — and it’s gone. Keep important content a safe distance from the trim edge on the cover and the inside pages alike.
Hardback inside pages come two ways. Glued is cheaper to produce and perfect for most books. Section sewn stitches the pages into folded sections with thread before binding — more hard-wearing, more resilient to being pressed flat, and more expensive. The upside of that upgrade: you can shout about it when you promote the book. “Section sewn” belongs on a premium book’s sales page, and readers will pay more for a book that’s visibly built to last.
Endpapers are the sheets that join your inside pages to the boards — leave them classic, print them, or go for a coloured or marbled stock for a moment of theatre every time the cover opens. Head and tail bands — the tiny fabric rolls at the top and bottom of the spine — are a small cost with an outsized effect on how finished the book feels.
Like perfect binding, hardback covers are supplied as a spread with the spine through the centre — we’ll confirm your exact spine size once your page count is final.
| Stapled booklet | Perfect bound | Hardback | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Page count | 8–72 (multiple of 4) | 32 minimum | 28 inside minimum |
| Spine | Stapled edge | Square, from 3mm — printable | Square, from 9mm — printable |
| Opens flat? | Completely — full spreads usable | No — design around the gutter | Section sewn helps |
| Files we need | One PDF, reading order | Cover spread + inside pages | Cover spread + inside pages |
| Feel | Light, zine energy | Professional paperback | Premium keepsake |
| Budget | £ | ££ | £££ |
Finish your artwork first — if the page count changes, the spine changes with it. Then check the common sizes on our perfect binding set-up guide or simply ask us: tell us your page count and paper and we’ll give you the exact number.
Two options: add pages (a few well-placed blanks or extra images feel intentional, not padded) or switch style. Under 32 pages and dreaming of a spine? Get to 32. Sitting at 30 for a stapled booklet? Go to 28 or 32 — multiples of four only.
On perfect bound and hardback books, yes — once the spine is around 5mm or wider there’s room for a title. Below that, we recommend leaving it clean so the text can’t creep round to the covers.
Stapled booklet: one PDF, cover to cover, single pages in reading order. Perfect bound or hardback: one PDF for the cover as a spread (spine through the centre) and a second PDF of inside pages, single pages in reading order. Everything with 3mm bleed on all four edges.
Only for stapled booklets, where each folded sheet makes four pages. Perfect bound and hardback books just need an even number — you can go up in twos.
All three work — it depends on your market. Stapled opens completely flat for reading aloud and keeps costs down; 32+ pages perfect bound earns you a spine for the bookshop shelf; hardback is the classic gift edition. Plenty of authors print a stapled or perfect bound run alongside a hardback edition.
Tell us your page count and we’ll tell you your options — then a real person checks your file by hand, for free.
