Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Spiral or comb bound

Has anyone tried to "dismantle" a music book in a descent way and made it spiral or comb bound, to make it easier on turning pages?

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I've heard if you take a book to any local printers, they will do this very cheaply.
You probably need to rebind quite a few books before you recovered the cost of the equipment needed to do it yourself.

Absolutely, I do it all the time.

I take it to a local LOWES store and get it rebound for a few dollars.

Well, worth it.

Take it to a local office supply (or similar) store that offers that type of service, rather than try to do it yourself. The store's charge for doing it is quite reasonable.

I've done it with quite a few music books and it is worth every penny.

I've done a couple now at Fed-Ex Office. Sure helps in the page turning department!!! Some volumes are bound so poorly you have to practically break the binding to get the book to stay open!! So, for a few bucks, the spiral bound solves everything.

Staples does this for a very very reasonable charge and I've never had to wait more than a day. They'll do comb or spiral. I find spiral bound to be easiest to work with. I've got many many books from the 70s, 80s, and 90s that are falling apart so I've been gradually getting them all bound.

For me, the comb bindings always seem to bind up within the comb, and the square-cut holes don't turn as smoothly as a spiral binding.

You guys are geniuses! Seriously, this never occurred to me. I'm gonna have to have me a Staples trip sometime in the near future!

I haven't done it, but I'm considering having my Beethoven and Mozart volumes bound like this. I'll take the suggestion about spiral and probably go that way, though it's slightly more costly.

If the book is thick, it could be worth considering having it bound as several volumes, otherwise: 1) thicker ones become unwieldy, and worse with age; and 2) only one volume will wear at a time, meaning they'll potentially last much longer. It could mean having to print a second cover and index?

Great question, Johan d. Like others, above, I had never thought of this either. Today, I stopped at a FedEx office supply and found out that they charge about $5.50 per spiral binding. They said I could combine a couple of my thinner books into one binding and still get the $5.50 price. This is great because I have collected several books of 20-30 pages with short pieces at my level, and having them in one binder will make them much easier to find and use.

Tomorrow, I'll check out OfficeMax, Staples, and/or Kinkos. I'll report what I find.

I cut off the spines of my books with a Stanley knife, then use a heavy duty hole punch before putting them into standard A4 loose leaf folders, that way I can easily remove pages for copying or whatever.

I've been having my books bound for several years at Kinkos. The only books I have that didn't need binding were very old and had strings for binding. The only thing I dislike is not having very many spines on the bookshelf (I have to dig through a shelf to find a particular book). Having books stay perfectly flat on the piano is totally worth it though and makes playing much more enjoyable. Like others, I prefer the spiral over the comb, I think the pages turn a bit easier.

I've found that playing piano is hard enough with two hands dedicated to playing the piano. Trying to keep a book open can be a fulltime job for a pageturner if the book has a bad binding.

I had a lot of books I wanted to scan to use on my tablet as well, so I invested in a stack paper cutter and spiral binding machine, as well as a large format scanner. About $500 total investment, but I've done many dozens of books; for about $.25 per book and a few minutes' work I get them scanned and bound. Plus, no trips across town. Plus, anything I download and print I can bind, also magazines, etc. I had years' worth of "Sheet Music Magazine" I scanned and bound.

Way to go, EP. Now I'm experiencing binder envy!

Not sure I'd like to bind anything.
If the copyright police comes around I might be bound to the crime.

I'm assuming you mean that in jest and you're not implying that re-binding a book is violating a copyright ...
Perhaps I should add that the scanning is strictly for backup purposes!

Yes, just a play on words.

Did it and here's the before



and after



It only costed me 3€

Awesome result, Johan d and at a very reasonable cost!

I've printed and bound thousands of plastic comb and metal spiral bound presentations. I strongly prefer metal spiral bindings.

In my experience, pages are easier to turn and stay flat with metal spiral bindings. Usually there are more holes so I think they are more durable. And round metal through round holes seems to cause less friction than sharp plastic 90 degree angles through square holes do.

Unfortunately, metal spiral bindings can be easily bent, making page turning more difficult.

Also, the plastic bindings are faster to assemble and disassemble.