# binding: keeping books open is hard

i really like reading books. i do not do it often though. it mostly happens in batches where i read many books over a few days when i have a few days of calmness available around me. these days i usually read on kindle. it is very convenient, light and there is the benefit that i do not need to physically store the books. i do not like the idea of having a bookcase of the all the books i ever read: it takes space, maintenance (ugh, i hate cleaning) and i do not really want others see what i read. having said all that i do occassionally run across a physical book. usually someone loans one to me, or i just pick one up randomly when i am at a place which has books and i have time. my problem is that the book usability is quite bad due to the way the pages are bound together!

for instance i cannot just open the typical book in the middle and put it onto the desk and read it from there. it would just close itself like a spring. i have to keep holding the pages to keep the book from closing. if i want to hold the book in air, i often need two hands. for one hand holding, i have to roll over one side of the book. reading the rolled side is quite annoying if even possible. it is also very easy to break the binding. once i do that, the book becomes more brittle, the individual papers might fall out much easier. also i have to hold the book slightly differently depending i am reading the beginning, the middle or the end of it.

what annoys me the most is that all those problems go away with coil or spiral binding. one downside i can think of is that maybe books do not stack well if bound that way. that is however not a problem for me because i do not care about how nice a books look when stacked but about its content and ease of consuming that content. all my notebooks are coil bound and they are convenient to use. why is it then that most modern books are still bound with that annoying method? i tried searching the web for an explanation and i could not find any. my only guess is that people are so used to this horribleness that they do not even realize things could be better. this is so annoying that if i wanted a printed version of a book, i would try to get the ebook version, print that and coil bind it myself. why is this so hard to do in the printing press in the first place?

the other downside i can think of is that this way it might be harder to search for a specific book in a bookcase since the book might not have a side with a title on it. i am not convinced that this is a problem though. i am pretty sure you could slide a long piece of cardboard or a plastic marker into the coil that contains the title when you look at it from side. think of this like sliding a pen into the coil and clipping it to it. when reading the book you pull this marker out. whenever you finished a reading session you slide the marker back and put the book back onto the bookcase. you can easily clip other random stuff to the coil.

and more importantly there is no need to "close" the book. no need for bookmarks or remembering page numbers. next time you pick up the book, you can start reading where you left off. in fact all this is pretty awesome! i should totally start my own book printing business.

# edit from 2021: i've posted this to r/changemyview.

since after 2 years i was still holding this view, i decided to ask reddit about it at https://old.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/o0z5jj/cmv_books_should_be_wirebound/.

here are the common counterarguments:

• can't stack: hoarding such books would be hard for collectors and bookstores. while this is true, i'm not sure why i should inconvenience my reading experience for this. apparently people don't buy books to read but to show them off. i'm not the target audience for most books i suppose.
• lacks durability: if you heavily use a book, wirebound books are more likely to break. this is probably true too. but still, it's not that convincing for me while i live in a world full of planned obsolescence. :(
• is costly: to counteract the durability problem, higher quality paper will be needed. and the lack of established mass production for such books also makes it costlier. true... but it's unclear how much costlier it would be.
• use an ebook reader: if my only problem is inconvenience, maybe i just need a good quality ebook reader. yeah, this is also true and is pretty much what i do. ebook readers also explain to me why others aren't complaining about books.

it was a nice discussion. i learned some nuance from it but didn't really make me like ordinarily bound books better. if anything, it made me like my kindle more.

published on 2019-01-26, last modified on 2021-07-12

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