Discussing the Cost Reduction of Books from the Prepress Design

How to reduce the cost of books is a matter of concern to each of our publishing workers. As a printing staff, we should be skilled in mastering platemaking, printing processes, and the price standards for printing books and magazines, understanding the performance of paper specifications, and the production capabilities of the various printing factories. In the printing work, according to the production capacity of the printing plant, the plate printing process and the selection of paper materials should be reasonably arranged to reduce the cost of the book.

Every book you do needs to be designed by the designer. Designers must design based on content, nature, total amount of text, and readers. The cost of books is an important factor in the competition in the book market. Let's talk about how to reduce the cost of books from the perspective of prepress design.

1, paper opening

If the selection of materials is unreasonable, the margin will increase and the effective use of paper will decrease. Books with more short lines, such as horizontal poetry, use 32 copies, which have a lot of gaps in their cuts and openings, and use more paper. If you use a 36-inch long format, you can save paper. If the cost is too small, the number of folds and light edge materials are also more. In order to facilitate the printing, as far as possible without or with less irregular copy, this can reduce the cost of printing.

2, paper materials

Paper materials account for a large proportion of the cost of books, accounting for more than 40%. Therefore, rational selection of paper materials is an important aspect of reducing the cost of books.

Ordinary books, such as compilations, learning materials, literary readings, etc., can be used in paperback with 52g/m2 (hereinafter abbreviated as 52g) letterpress paper. Hardcover can use 60g or 70g offset paper.

Songs, children's books monochrome available 60g paper, color available 80g offset paper.

Textbooks generally use 49-60g letterpress paper; reference book paperback 52g letterpress paper, hardcover book selectable 40g dictionary paper, general technical standards available 80 ~ 120g offset paper.

Pictures and albums, generally with 80 ~ 120g offset paper or 100 ~ 128g coated paper; according to the fine print of the album, open the choice of offset paper or coated paper and gram. New Year pictures and posters generally use 50-80g single-sided offset paper, comics 52-50g letterpress paper, and high-precision small picture cards with 256g glass cards.

Magazines generally use 52-80g paper, monochrome generally use 60g writing paper or offset paper, color generally use 80g double-version paper.

Books, magazines, covers, inserts and lining pages: 100 to 150 g of paper for 200 pages, 200 to 180 g of paper for 200 pages, 80 to 150 g of paper for inserts, and 80 to 150 g of lining based on the thickness of the book. Choose.

The same type of paper, the heavier the number of grams, the higher the price, the increase in the weight of the text paper, the thickness of the spine is also thickened, and sometimes also need to adjust the weight and opening number of cover paper, which will produce a series of associated relations. Paper costs are often increased.

Seriously choose paper materials, but you can't cut corners. If you use plain paper to print finer screens, the layout will be blurred, and all will be invalid and wasteful. Another example is that newsprint can be used as an ordinary reading material, and books that require long-term preservation cannot use weatherproof newsprint.

3, the number of pages

When working together, try to avoid zero pages. Because a book is not only positive, but also other parts such as four seals, title page, sequence, directory, copyright page, etc., and may be different for each part of the paper, the total number of paper with the same paper type make up The multiple of 4 is not difficult.

4, binding form and layout design

The commonly used book binding forms include saddle stitching, flat stitching, sewing thread binding, glue binding, and the like.


Saddle stitching, staple stitching and glue binding can be designed to be smaller in the central cross-page center. If it is in the form of a flat book, the heart of the center's cross-page book must be relatively large, because the flat book's mouth is about 5mm.

When designing a manuscript, the size of the body font, the density between the lines, the width and width of the blank space around the caption, the line of the title and the blank line, and so on are all related to the cost of the book. For example, if a book is an ordinary 32-page book, the original design is a horizontal 5-character word with 26 words and 25 lines on each side = 650 words. There are 5/8 lines between the lines and 240,000 words of manuscripts. A total of 370 faces are required. Rows of 26 words × 27 lines = 702 words, 1/2 between the lines, only 342 planes; a difference of 28 surfaces. We can reduce the cost of the book at all stages of printing, paper, and binding. Of course, this does not mean that the layout is getting denser and better, such as children's books, the words should not be too small, and the line spacing should not be too narrow; instead, it means that as far as the contents of the manuscript and the readers' target are concerned, paper materials are saved as much as possible to reduce the cost of the books. .

5, reasonably determine the cover size

When designing the cover, the design should be based on the finished product size, spine thickness, and size of the mouth. When designing the size of the mouthpiece, it is generally possible to make the mouth slightly larger without wasting paper and facilitating printing. The majority is more than 30 mm. However, some cover designers do not understand the paper specifications, the number of openings, and the performance of the printing press. When designing the cover, they do not fix the size of the mouthpiece according to the number of paper sheets. After the platemaking, they often do not meet the requirements of the paper size specification and cause waste. Most book covers now require lamination after printing, which in turn increases the cost of lamination.

For example, a set of books is divided into upper and lower volumes, and 32 books are opened for the Big 32. The upper and lower volumes are about 600, printed on 52g paper, and the thickness of the spine is 22mm. The cover is printed using offset printing, and the upper and lower volumes are each printed at 20,000. The cover is overlaminated. Because the designers do not understand the paper specifications, the design of the mouth is 65mm, such a large mouth, you need to use 787 × 10921/16 paper printing, if the design according to the number of paper opening, the design will be 40mm, you can use 787×10921/8 paper printing. The printing fee, paper, and laminating fee of the two were actually different by about 4,000 yuan. It can be seen that when designing the cover, designers must understand the paper specifications and opening numbers, and try to reduce the cost of the book when designing the cover to avoid unnecessary economic losses.

Some cover and front and rear ring lining design is relatively simple, to print a few spot colors, the amount of printing is not large, plate-making can consider making copper and zinc plate, printing can be used plate machine printing, because the plate printing is a single small sheet printing, can be used Flowers can also be cut into small sheets with scraps of paper. This can increase the utilization of paper, and the cost of platemaking can also be reduced.

6, frame material

When selecting hard cover materials, the use of leather, cotton, hemp, silk, wool and other fabrics should be controlled. Use tough paper, paint paper or lacquer, etc. as much as possible. In addition to special needs, try to avoid using real gold foil. Hot stamping materials can be replaced with anodized aluminum or color chips to reduce the cost of the book. More……

7, printing process

For general 32- or 16-open single- and bi-color books, the number of prints is more than 50,000 copies, and the printer is usually arranged for printing. Because the speed of the rotary machine is fast and the printed pages have been folded, the printing costs are lower than those of the flatbed printer. However, for books under 50,000 volumes, the lead row can be printed by large automatic, small automatic or eight-page machines; the laser photocopying can be printed by a B-B double-sided offset printing press. This is a printing press that prints books and magazines. Paper printing fee calculation; or with 01, 08 type monochrome offset press printing, this offset printing press is a single-sided printing press, according to the color order to calculate the printing fee. However, using a B-B offset press is faster than a monochrome offset press and the printing cost is low. For the picture book with high quality requirements, two-color or four-color offset printing machines should be used as far as possible; for large-scale, such as New Year pictures, front and back ring linings of books, etc., a single-color offset printing machine should be used for printing, and the printing quality is better.

The printing staff should understand the performance of various printing presses and the calculation standards of the wages. Otherwise, they may use unreasonable printing processes with high costs, which will result in a decline in the quality of books and increase in costs.