bookpublishing

You’re only going to find this post fascinating if you really like books. Okay, you’ve been warned.

Curious about why some books have blank pages at the end? Well, it’s not an accident. Every book that gets published goes to a printer (my company doesn’t do its own printing, although it used to long ago) and each book has to be “to form.” Form is the most efficient and cost effective size for a printer to make. Whole forms are multiples of 16, half forms are multiples of eight, and some quarter forms, multiples of four, are allowed. 240 pages and 256 pages are two of the most common and cost-effective forms. So if you have a book that comes in at 238—including everything: front matter (half title page, title page, copyright page, TOC, introduction, foreword, preface), manuscript text, and back matter (appendices, bibliography, acknowledgments, index)—and there’s no room for you to add pages or move things around to fit (if you can, that’s the ideal), you have to include 2 blanks at the end. Hardcover books and color books cannot be quarter forms according to our printers for those books (they are done in China). Blanks are less and less common as we move into a more environmentally-friendly age. Blanks in a color book, at our company, are no longer allowed. In nearly all books, we do everything we can to avoid having blanks.

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