Is Mechanical Binding the Last Short-Run Frontier?

There’s been many advances in adhesive and wire-stitch (saddle) binding over the past 10 years. As the digital print world grows ever larger, vendors have had to shift their solutions from fast, large-volume output, to fast, product-of-one output.

But how about mechanical binding? This finishing method remains the most practical for a large variety of products. Manuals, maps, notebooks, textbooks, reports and reference materials all benefit from the complete “lay open” quality of mechanical binding. Added to that is the ability to easily include tabbed pages for sectioning.