How to measure a book for printing
What size is the book you're looking to print? Does it not fit a standard size? Here's a straightforward guide on how to measure your book's dimensions.
Measuring your book
Materials
- The book you need to measure
- A sufficiently long ruler
- A solid, flat object
- A flat surface for working on
This guide focuses on measuring a portrait-oriented book.
Steps
1. Minimise book movement
Position your book on a level surface, pressing it against a wall or a solid flat object like another book or a firm cardboard box. Align the longest side of your book with your solid object. This setup helps achieve more accurate measurements by reducing any movement.
2. Measure the width
Keep the long side of your book against the solid object. Place your ruler on the flat surface and align the short edge of the ruler with the solid object, ensuring the long edge of the ruler is level with the bottom of your book. This arrangement will give you the width of the book.
3. Measure the height
Pick up your book, rotate it 90 degrees, and set it back down on a flat surface, aligning the short edge with a solid object. Then position the short edge of your ruler against this object, ensuring the ruler's long edge is level with the bottom of your book. This method will accurately measure the height of your book.
4. Measure the spine
Keep your book aligned with a sturdy object, position your ruler vertically with the shortest edge on your flat surface and the longer edge along your book’s spine. You can then measure from the flat surface to the top edge of the spine.
However, when printing your book with YouLovePrint, our online ordering system will calculate the spine width when you add pages to your order. You can also see the spine width at the bottom of the file upload screen.
Top Tips
Always measure to the nearest millimetre.
For a hardcover book, the cover typically extends about 3mm beyond the book block (interior pages) on each side. For instance, the cover of an A4 210mm x 297mm book would roughly measure 216mm x 303mm. It’s important to factor this in!
To easily work out the spine width of your project, utilise the Spine Calculator tool found in the Artwork Dashboard of your order.
After determining your project's dimensions, you can check the cost of printing using our instant price calculator tool.
Custom book sizes
You might discover that the book size you're looking to replicate does not correspond to any of the standard industry sizes. Penguin paperbacks, for example, have their own unique dimensions.
Fortunately, we offer custom size book printing by cutting industry standard paper sizes down to fit the desired dimensions of your book. So when you place your order, choose a standard paper size that the height and width of your book design would fit inside.
When you upload your artwork, make sure that it is sized to print at your custom size. Then contact our customer services team, quoting your order number.
If you cannot fit your custom book size within the industry standard paper sizes on our website, please contact us and we will endeavour to get you a bespoke quote and get your job into production.
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