Why some books are standard portrait

[dbace23]

Guys i have a simple question. What are the advantages of a book being standard portrait? Why is the national geographic book 18x25cm?
Why not a4? Isn't it much more wasteful when you mass produce this books, because of the waste?

[garricks]

Welcome to the forum dbace. :P We ask all new members to read the forum rules posted here and here. They will give you all the info you need on how the forum runs, the rules and regs, and give you some background info on our long running, inside jokes

[PanToshi]

Welcome to GDF!

[hank_scorpio]

We have a journal that is printed 4 times a year.

It was suggested to revamp it to make it smaller in size for cost reasons. The print company suggested 190 x 260 mm.

When I manually planned the journal I noticed that if I trimmed it another 10mm to 250mm it fit the printed sheet better.

Because 250x4 = 1000 which is the width of a B1 sheet.

When I contacted the printers and asked them to requote at 190 x 250mm instead it reduced the overall cost of the printing by €10,000 p.a.

So yeh - reducing your overall size to something not A4 standard can save you money.


Best to talk to the printers at what is more cost effective to setup for - and to get the best use out of whatever size sheet you're printing on.

[dbace23]

thanks hank_scorpio, that makes sense. after fitting the paper on the B1, it generates more sheets. Besides cost efficency, does it affect the output aesthethically?

[hank_scorpio]

Not at all - that's what designers are for. The magazine looks the exact same.

I reduced the columns from 3 to 2 columns as it's easier to read in the smaller format that way.

Other than that - nothing has changed. It looks the exact same as before.

[Dr.McNinja]

Dayum.

OP there are many sizes of papers and ways to fit things onto those sizes especially after factoring in bleeds and space for marks. Producing a full A4 sized document/book etc is not always that simple. For example, if you decide to make it landscape, you won't be able to use standard digital printing *unless* you do single sheets for case or ring binding..

Point is - it's complicated.

[Buda]

Hardly anything is printed on an A4 sheet these days. They're not even printed on an A3 sheet. They're printed oversized and then trimmed down. So there will always be a little trim waste even if you print exactly A4. Generally the cost is the same for an A4 book as one that 10 or 20 mm larger or smaller in width and/or height. So it's down to how the printed product feels in your hands and possibly how they charge for ads

[Dr.McNinja]

I found that out when I had a hard time looking for exact A4 and A3 sized paper.. And i was surrounded by tonnes of paper. I went insane for a moment there.

[<b>]

Originally Posted by Buda

Hardly anything is printed on an A4 sheet these days.

Hmmm, it never even occurred to me that the original poster might be thinking that magazines were printed one page at a time.

As Buda said, most things are printed on much larger paper sheets or, even, long rolls of paper when the printing is done on a web press. With a magazine, for example, many pages are printed at the same time on a large sheet or roll of paper. That paper is subsequently folded up and trimmed to size, with all the pages automatically being folded into the correct position.

Paper and presses come in many different sizes. With a magazine (or any other printed material) the printer can work with the publisher to optimize the size of the magazine to take full advantage of the presses and paper to get the most for the least and with as little waste as possible.

A huge-run, high-printing-quality magazine, like National Geographic, might possibly even order custom paper directly from a paper mill.