Information
Are you ready to be published? Whether it's a first novel, a family history, a children's book or a photography collection, bookprinting.co.nz has the experience and the passion to make it happen! Need full book printing services? Click here for a quote At bookprinting.co.nz, we view book binding as a meeting of art and science. The latest technology brings us new book binding materials and equipment that goes hand in hand with our careful crafting and experience. At bookprinting.co.nz, we see your book binding project as an opportunity to do justice to the work and vision you put into it.
As a digital printing and publishing specialist, bookprinting.co.nz has the versatility and expertise to create your dreambook - even if you only need a few. No book binding job is too big or too small at bookprinting.co.nz, and we specialize in small runs and first editions. Wondering about the best method for your book binding? We can help! Some of our options include:
PUR Perfect (Soft Cover) Book Binding
Great for training manuals, sports programs, novels and any thick paperback or hardback. Perfect book binding is accomplished with digitally printed pages clamped in a vise-like structure. These pages are drawn across a blade that carves notches in the bound edge. This “roughed up" spine is passed over a hot melt glue dispenser. Glue adheres to the edges and works its way into the notches. After the glue is applied to the spine, the whole assembly is forced into what will become the wrap around cover. Completing the book binding, the cover is folded around the “book block”, glued and folded up the front and back of the book. This form of book binding is preferred as the standard for paperbacks as well as the beginning of a cloth covered high-end hard bound book.
Why PUR?
PUR is now the industry standard. This glue is so strong that the paper will rip before the glue will give way. Don't be fooled by companies offering EVA gluing, this is NOT suitable for coated papers and also fails in the long term with pages falling out!
Hardcover (Case) Binding
A hardcover aka hardback is a book bound with thick protective cover, with usually a paper or leather dust jacket over the main cover. The aim of hardcover is protection and durability. These books are mainly for long-term use and collectors’ editions. Hardcover books last far longer than the corresponding paperbacks. They do not get damaged easily thus making them perfect for reference guides, great literary works, etc.
In addition, there is a difference in the type of paper used to print hardcover books. The paper used is long-lasting acid-free type. Acid-free paper has a pH value of 7 (neutral) which makes it highly durable. The papers are stitched or glued to the spine.
Hardbacks are prepared for commercial works, best sellers, reference books, etc., which should be long lasting.
Bookprinting.co.nz produce many hardcover books and they are very popular amongst client wishing to produce family history books or reference books where longevity is essential.
Coil Book Binding
Coil binding is a colorful and versatile type of book binding chosen for its ability to fold completely overon itself or lay flat for easy working. The new materials today are plastic and metal and vary in size from ¼ inch to several inches. and can be made to have a very stiff cover and back with a glossy UV cured plastic coating or a traditional Acetate clear front cover and blue or black vinyl back that has been in use for decades. bookprinting.co.nz has automated equipment for the punching of paper and the insertion of the coils to make your book binding experience quick and trouble free. Order your book binding project online or have us do the book printing and binding as a turnkey project.
Saddle Stitched Book Binding
Saddle stitching is a great book binding option for menus, pamphlets, or short books and magazines. Quick and inexpensive, it is as simple as 2 staples, a fold and a trim. However, it takes an experienced book binding company like bookprinting.co.nz to pay attention to details in your digital printing file... like “creep”. “Creep” is the tendency of the middle pages in a saddle stitched book to have their edges protrude from the folded book more and more and more as they approach the center of the bound book. When these pages are trimmed to have a uniform edge, sometimes the middle pages have information trimmed off. bookprinting.co.nz manages this with special book binding anti-creep software that gently nudges the print away from the cutting edge as it approaches the middle of the book.
Spine Size Guide
If you are setting up the design of your own cover, the table below will provide a useful guide to the width of the spine for your book. We recommend that you supply an 'open' file, i.e. a file in the software that you designed it in, so we can do any fine adjustments to the spine size which can sometimes occur before the cover is be printed.
Number of sheets in your book 80gsm paper 100gsm paper
One sheet of paper = 2 pages Thickness of spine in mm Thickness of spine in mm
50 5 5.5
75 7.5 8
100 10 10.5
125 13 13.5
150 15.5 16.5
175 18 19
200 20.5 21
225 23 24
250 25 27
275 28 30
300 31 32
325 33.5 35
350 36 38
Laminated Covers
If you wish to have laminated covers this can be done in either Gloss, Matt or Soft Touch Satin finish laminate. With hardback bound books it is standard practice to laminate the outer case of the book to give it extra durability.
ISBN (International Standard Book Number)
International Standard Book Numbers (ISBN) are available free to New Zealand publishers of books and other print, electronic or multimedia publications. They are provided by the New Zealand Standard Book Numbering Agency, which operates within the National Library.
An ISBN is a unique 13-digit figure divided into four parts. It should always be printed exactly as given, for example: ISBN 978-0-9582813-0-0 or ISBN 978-1-877257-08-7.
You can apply online for your ISBN at this link which usually takes about 3 days. An ISBN is essential if you are planning on selling your books through retail stores or in the library. If your book is just for friends or family you do not need an ISBN. Please note, we used to be able to apply on your behalf but they no longer allow printers to do this so you will need to apply yourself.
Benefits of having an ISBN
An ISBN provides a book with a 'fingerprint' that allows publishers, book suppliers and libraries to easily locate and order it.
Legal Deposit
You are required to supply 2 copies of your publication to the National Library, as specified in the National Library of New Zealand (Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa) Act 2003. Please takes this into account in the quantity of books that you order.
Bar Codes
Retail stores require bar codes. Most retail stores will not stock products without bar codes as the checkout system relies on the bar code system to operate.
If you are considering selling your book through a retail store we strongly urge you to have the barcode which corresponds to your ISBN number printed on the book.
Bookprinting.co.nz can generate and print a barcode on the back cover of your book.
If you need a barcode for your book or magazine, see ISBN above for the best way is to get an ISBN number (for books) or ISSN number (for magazines). This number can then be easily transformed into a barcode number for your book / magazine, without the need to purchase a separate barcode number.
ISBN (International Standard Book Numbers) and ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) are a unique identifier assigned to each edition of every published book, book-like product, magazine and serial.
Copyright Registration
There is no system for copyright registration in New Zealand. You don’t need to submit your work to any organisation, publish your work, pay a registration fee, put a copyright notice on it, or do anything else to get copyright protection − it is automatic and free.
An original work is protected from the moment is put into “material form” such as in writing or recorded in some other way.
You may be able to register your work with an independent party (such as the New Zealand Writers Guild) to obtain independent proof of your claim to authorship. However, this registration does not establish copyright ownership and is not necessary to secure copyright protection.
We advise you to put our standard "Publishers" page at the beginning of your book to inform readers of their obligations not to copy your material. This is available free of charge from ourselves when you order your books.
Guidelines for Submitting Manuscripts which have been Typed using Microsoft Word or Microsoft Publisher
Microsoft Word documents do not transport well from one computer to another, problems such as formatting changes occur and we cannot reliably print your book directly from a Word file.
This document gives you the steps necessary to prepare your Word file correctly and then to make a PDF file from it which we can use to print you book. Most of the guidelines below are also applicable to the Microsoft Publisher software also.
Preparing your book using Microsoft Word
Step 1 The page size of your document must match the page size you would like in your book.
E.g. If your book will be an A5 sized novel then your Word page size must be set to A5 size also. We mention this because, as Word is an American software program, if automatically defaults to the standard American letter page size which does not match any of the New Zealand page and paper sizes. If you type your novel at American Letter size, which is close to A4 size, when we reduce it down to fit A5 the font size will also reduce and may become too small to read.
Step 2 Set up your pages as left and right hand pages, this is called “Mirrored” in Word. Setting all the pages as left hand, which is the default setting, will result in your margins being wrong on alternate pages and also your pages numbers being in the wrong place (unless they are centred)
Step 3 Set up your margins, with the pages set to “mirrored” the inside margins, which will be the ones nearest the spine of your book should be set to a larger size than the outside margins in order to allow for the binding of the book. Not doing this will result in your pages looking slightly off centre to your reader due to part of the margin being taken up by the binding at the spine.
Step 4 Type your text, add your photos etc and format your fonts, headings, Chapter titles etc. If you want each chapter to start on a right hand page then it may be necessary to insert a blank pages at the end of some chapters to ensure this happens.
Step 5 When your book is completed and you are happy with all your formatting, layout etc PLEASE PLEASE proof read your book at least twice. Also, if possible, get a friend to proof read it to, you will be amazed how many typos get overlooked time and again when an author reads their own work. We can’t emphasize how important this is as it can cause us several hours extra work having to re-lay up all your files for printing if you submit a new file once you receive the proof copy of your book which we supply so you can conduct final checks on the print quality and binding etc.
Making a PDF File
Step 6 When you are happy with your manuscript and its layout and formatting and are ready to submit the file for us to produce your book, then the final stage is to save your file as a PDF file.
Why?
PDF stands for Portable Document Format. This format was designed by Adobe specifically to enable a file to be moved from one computer to another and for the document to be able to be opened on the receiving computer and be exactly the same as it was on the computer it was generated on. If you make a PDF file it will retain all the formatting. spacing , fonts, page sizing etc on our system as it had on yours. This enables us to reliably print your file without fear of things changing as would invariably happen if you sent us your native Word file.
Step 7 Making your PDF file. Ideally you should have the software program called Adobe Acrobat Distiller. This is not the same as Adobe Acrobat Reader, if you have downloaded and read any of our documents from the website then you must already have the Acrobat Reader, which is free anyway, installed on your computer. The full version of Adobe Acrobat is an expensive software program and there are cheaper and free programs for making PDF files available on the internet. Many computers come with a PDF writer software installed on them already and this usually takes the form of a printer in your printers list. When you print a document to a PDF writer “printer”, instead of printing out the document on paper , it will create a PDF file , usually on your desktop or a location you choose, which can then be emailed to us or copied onto a CD etc.
We recommend a free PDF maker called “Cute PDF” which is available as a free down load at this link http://www.cutepdf.com/products/cutepdf/Writer.asp.
Conclusion If you are a regular user of Microsoft Word you will probably already be familiar with the points outlined in the preceding paragraphs. Many first time authors are not however and fall into these traps without even realizing it. We apologize in advance if you are a Word power user and these guidelines are for those not so familiar with the program.
If you are unsure about and of the points raised in these guidelines then please feel free to call or email us. We are more than happy to help our clients to achieve the outcomes they want for there work whether it be a novel or non fiction book, Attention to details such as those mentioned in the text above help to achieve a professional looking end result, which is good for your readers and good for us at Bookprinting.co.nz
A4 Landscape or larger
This used to be a problem until recently. New technology advances with digital printing presses now allow much bigger paper sheets size to be printed. These sizes are needed to print the wrap around covers for A4 wide books which exceed the standard paper sheet sizes. At bookprinting we have the latest Ricoh C9200 digital press which can print sheets up to 1200mm long. We can cater for books up to 280 x 280mm in size.
Odd sized books
In order to give the most economical quote to print your books we need to fit as many pages of the book onto the sheet size of the paper, for example an A5 size book will fit 4 pages per sheet, these are then cut down , collated and bound to make the finished book. Many clients get quotes from American websites, this can be false economy if it is your intention to ultimately have the book printed in New Zealand. This is because America uses imperial paper sizes and New Zealand uses metric paper sizes. If a book is designed to fit the American sizes we won’t be able to print as many pages per sheet on the NZ sized paper and this will increase the cost of the book. We can still print the size book you want but it can cost anything up to double if we can only print 2 pages per sheet intead of 4. Another thing that needs to be taken into consideration at the beginning. Usually we can overcome this problem by resizing the book to fit the nearest NZ paper size.
Proof Copies
Primarily the proof copy of your book is supplied so you can check that you are happy with the quality of the printing, binding, paper stock and colours. Its is also really the last chance to proof read the book before it goes to print. It's not too late to make minor adjustments at this stage but we do encourage clients to proof read the book at least twice before submitting the files to us as major changes once the proof copy has been produced entail the whole set up procedure being repeated, however, this is better than the books containing major errors. Nowadays a larger proportion of books can be "proofed" online using our flipbook software. You will receive an email with a link where you can open the book and proof read it online just like a real book. In the email will also be a link to our "Proof copy sign-off sheet" . Once you are happy to proceed then the form can be submitted online and the production process will start.
Turnaround Times
Once you returned the online proof copy acceptance form we can order in any special papers or materials we may need if they are not already in stock. The files are then set up for final printing. The final books normally take10-21 working days from when we receive the acceptance form, obviously this can vary slightly depending on workload or if it is a particularly big print run or, if the books are hard cover, it can take a few days longer to produce these. We would normally give you a pretty accurate indication of how long you books will take.
Payment terms
Payment can be made by several methods. Online internet banking is popular and our account number is listed on the invoice we will email to you. We also accept cash or eftpos at the retail shop. Our invoice will also include a link where you can pay online by credit card if you wish. As most books are 'one offs' we usually ask for a 50% deposit once the proof copy is accepted and the balance is payable once we inform you that books are ready for despatch. Clients who print on a regular monthly basis can open a trading account (terms & conditions apply)
What is Self-Publishing?
A traditional publishing company will effectively handle all aspects of your book, from editing to distribution. The publisher will also take ownership of your printed books But all of these services come at a price. Typically, the author will give up a lot of rights in the process. Another problem can be getting a publisher to take on your work at all. Whilst established authors may have little problem establishing a contract for their latest book things are rarely that easy for the new author. Getting a 'foot in the door' can be hard work. With self-publishing, the author undertakes the publishing function. Bookprinting.co.nz will get your book into print and you will own these books. You are then responsible for promoting and distributing your book. But you also keep all of your rights and the profits you make from your sales.
Decisions to make regarding Self Publishing
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View the publication of your own book in a similar light to the reader's decisions for purchasing one type of book over another:
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Is your book likely to be popular and used as a reference work or become a bestseller? If so, choose hardback first.
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Is your book testing the waters, a first off print run, a novelty or specialist topic, or just a big unknown? If so, choose softcover first.
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Are you trying to keep down the costs of your print run? If so, choose softcover first.
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What are your readers likely to prefer? (You're going to have to stand in their shoes a bit for this one.)
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Consider whether it is either viable or possible for you to print a run of both hardcover and softcover books.
This might enable you to meet the needs of each type of reader. However, it's likely that your budget will be the ultimate deciding factor here as this will definitely be a more costly way to produce the book.
Bookprinting.co.nz ~ Self-Publishing
Bookprinting.co.nz is a full-service self-publishing company specializing in short runs to medium runs, usually from 20 up to about 1000+ books.
We make it easy to get your book into print. We're more than just a printing company. Our experience in the graphic design and publishing world–combined with our high-resolution printers and understanding of production and bookmaking set us apart.
High-quality short-run self-publishing is our specialty. We print runs from 20 books to more than 1000 copies, it's no problem.
Your book will be of the same high quality found in the high-street book stores. We can supply both paperback and hardback books or a mixture of both.
From start to finish, bookprinting.co.nz can handle the entire self-publishing process for you:
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Layout and design advice
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Scanning
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Copyright pages
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ISBN
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Bar Code Generation
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Cover design
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Custom paperback, hard back , wire bound or saddle stitch binding options.
We are your complete self publishing solution
Self-Publishing can be easy to do and bookprinting.co.nz will be there every step of the way.
Our experience reduces the amount of time and money you spend getting your book into print. Contact us today and learn how you can get your ideas published.
Getting started
It's as easy as 1-2-3 to get us started with your book:
Before You Start
Choosing the finished size you would like for your book should be one of the first tasks before you begin to compose the text. Setting the correct page size in your computer software to match the size of your book is essential if technical problems such as text reflowing are to avoided further down the track. If you are in any doubt please feel free to contact us we are only too pleased to advise you.
Prepare your manuscript
Ideally, no matter what software program you use to prepare your book, an Adobe PDF file is the preferred format to supply to us for printing. Using PDF ensures that your finished book will look and have the same format as your original typed manuscript. Adobe InDesign is a popular software program used by professionals and amateurs alike and will help you create a superb book which can easily be submitted for print. InDesign format also allows us to perform any last minute alterations you may require.
Paperback books and books with dust jackets need cover art, including a short summary and author's biography and photograph. This is best supplied as a separate file to the main body of the book.
Submit your files for printing.
Submitting files by email is very convenient and usually not a problem. However, some books, especially those containing photographs, can balloon into huge files which are best supplied by uploading to a file sharing website. We usually recommend www.wetransfer.com otherwise, files can be uploaded to "Dropbox" or one of the other file sharing sites which work very well these days and it is only necessary to email us the link to the file and we can then download it at our end.
Book Sizes
Most commercially produced books comform to certain basic sizes. In New Zealand the most popular is A4 (210 x 297mm) and A5 (148.5 x 210mm). Many other sizes are available such as B4 or B5. The basic reasoning behind these sizes is that the paper manufacturers also use this sizing system and therefore , for example, a press sheet of A1 size can be cut into 9 A4 sheets with no wastage. Therefore, to minimise waste, an ultimately the cost of the book, it is important to adhere to this sizing standard unless your book needs to be an oddball size for a specific reason. It goes without saying that the more wastage per sheet the more the paper cost for the book will be.
Paper Type
Bookprinting.co.nz has access to all New Zealands major paper merchants and a wide range of paper choices is available for the printing of your book. In practice most books tend to be printed on Offset/laser paper, Matt or Gloss art paper or recycled paper .
Offset/laser is the standard paper that such items as letterhead are normally printed on. It is an economical paper which is highly suited to paperback books, manuals, price books and the like. Coated papers such as Matt or Gloss art papers come in a variety of weights and are more suited to higher quality books containing photographs for example. Recycled paper is another option for those wanting a more off white finish or for those who are enviromentally sensitive. Our "Print Cream" paper is popular with novel writers. It has the offwhite creamy look found in many novels.
Paper Weights
Consideration should be given to the paper weight used in your book. If you are writing a novel for example, with several hundred pages then a heavy weight paper is not practical as it would make the book very thick and heavy for the user. As a general rule of thumb 100gsm would be the heaviest weight for a paperback book or 130gsm for a book printed on art paper.
Covers & Dust Jackets
With paperback books where the cover is affixed directly to the spine of the book then normally a 300gsm paper would be suitable, also 250gsm is popular for books where the lifespan may be shorter, conference handbooks for example, which may only need to last a week or so. Wrap around dust jackets are normally printed on 150gsm paper. Consideration should be given as to whether a dust jacket is essential if price is a consideration as some sizes need to be printed on special printing machines which can substantially add to the cost of the book especially on short runs.
Cover Design
We can design basic cover layouts including title, spine, ISBN numbers & barcodes and any blurb required about the book or its author. Any photo or graphic you supply can be used on the cover. The basic cover design is put together using material which you supply and the fixed price for this service is $120+gst. For clients requiring more sophisticated designs we suggest employing the services of a graphic design company. As our business is predominantly the printing of books there is a limit to the amount of time we can devote to design work. We will always work with you to try and accommodate any material you may wish to use