I find it incredibly synchronistic that the next art is what it is:

31: Bookbinding

For those who don’t know, I’m trying to wrap up the 2+ year project that is my comic book cookbook for gamers: What to Feed Your Raiding Party. Unfortunately I’m not quite to the binding stage of things, so today’s post is going to be brief so that I can get back to getting there.

As of this weekend I’d laid out the first 119 pages. That sounds like a lot, right? It is, but I think we’re going to hit or pass 250 because I’m barely through the recipes of Chapter 2 (of 5), so there’s still a ways to go.

On the subject of binding, though, I’ve always known how ‘Raiding Party would be bound and it has to do with the greater part of user experience.

Know what I hate? Having to prop open a cookbook to cook from it. Large, hard-cover books will usually stay open, at least after a few uses, but for soft-cover perfect bound books you pretty much have to break the spine (and risk pages falling out) to get it to stay open. Thing is, those soft-cover books are relatively inexpensive to produce (compared to hard-cover) and while still looking fairly professional.

I guess that’s why CreateSpace (the self-publishing arm of Amazon.com) only does soft-cover, perfect bound books.

You know those Jr League and church fundraiser cookbooks? Say what you will for their “professionalism” or lack thereof but they open flat and stay that way while I’m cooking.

Which is why the first printing of What to Feed Your Raiding Party will feature that same sort of comb binding to enable the book to lay flat without a spine to crack or pages to weight down. After that, once I’ve moved on to print-on-demand fulfillment, I’ll be going with Lulu.com because they offer a spiral-binding option that is still surprisingly affordable.

True, my books won’t be as easily available through Amazon as if I went with CreateSpace, but the user experience goes far beyond the sale.

Have you ever thought about the books you read and use and how they’re made? Are there any changes you would make to your favorite books to make them more user-friendly?