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Posts: 186
Registered:
November 2002
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Lay-flat options for the Guide
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Fri, 06 February 2004 13:36
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John Grillo wrote:
A while ago I sent off an e-mail with the suggestion that the Guide would be so much more readable if it were spiral bound. It would lay on the chart table and stay open to the page you want. I never got a reply. The guide is perfect in so many other ways that I take the risk of sounding like a complainer! I hope I don't sound that way. Just want to make something good even better. Any plans for that? John
P.S. I'm going to take another risk and tell you how stupid I am. I thought this spiral thing was such a good idea that I tried to do it myself. I took a spare volume of the Guide, got the best table saw blade I had, cut off the binder and attempted to three hole punch each page. When finished, I had what you call a basic mess! You can imagine what the cut looked like. Not pretty! To coin an overused expression, "I do need to get a life"! Help.
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Posts: 186
Registered:
November 2002
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Re: Lay-flat options for the Guide
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Fri, 06 February 2004 13:37
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Hello John,
Thank you very much for your thoughts about the spiral binding. My apologies I didin't reply sooner. Forgive me.
I couldn't agree more that it would be fantastic if the guide would lay open flat. When I first took over the guide, I looked very hard at all the lay-flat options I could find, including sprial binding. I eliminated spiral bindings as an option becasue of the size and weight of our pages and the hard use our guides are subject to. Where you might have a large chart table that can accomodate the open book, many readers have the book out in the weather or shoved under the dodger or cockpit cushions where the spiral willl inevitably get bent or damaged, which quickly leads to pages tearing out at their perforations--your basic mess! We struggle, for instance, with the pages of our chart kit charts, which are spirtal bound. The spirals have gotten bent, so the pages have to be very carefully manuevered in the spiral when turning them, and despite that care, there is a sheef of loose charts floating around in the chart drawer.
Another lay-flat option, which I thought was better, was called an Oto-binding system, where the cover is not glued to the spine, so the spine, with very flexible glue, can bend upward within the spine to allow the pages to open completely. But again, I thought the system too weak for onboard (particularly in the cockpit) use.
I have to mention a bias, too. As a child in first grade, my school had math workbooks with perferated pages, so we could do the problems on the pages and then tear them out and turn them in to the teacher for graading. But evertime the teache said turn to page sucha and such, inevitably my page would have somehow fallen out and disappeared. When the teacher began to accuse me of tearing the pages out so I wouldn't have to do the work, I began to have nightmares about "math time." I don't want the same when it is time to enter a tricky harbor in the fog!
We opted finally for conventional binding (perfect binding) that we have stitched together for added strength in the hardcover edition. This is a compromise, and like all all compromises, it is less than perfect in all conditions. It doesn't lay flat, the spines can break (just as the spirals can be bent) if the book is shoved under the cockpit cushion to hold it open and then indavertantly sat on. I thought an integral marker ribbon might be a good idea, like a good cookbook, but it proved too expensive, and I thought any creative individual could tape a piece of wool or some other telltale into the book as a marker ribbon.
What I hadn't counted on was someone as creative as you! I'd love to have a picture of you running the Guide through the table saw! Did you have a sprial binding put in, or did you put the pages in a loose-leaf binder?
So, to answer you question, I don't have any plans for spiral binding in the future, though my eyes are always open for a good way to make the guides lay flat.They say that someday books will be printed on demand so logically, they will have to be bound on demand. Perhaps spiral bindings could be an option. Or maybe by then there will be a better solution to the lay-flat vs strength dilemna.
Thank you again for your comments.
Curtis Rindlaub
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Posts: 3
Registered:
March 2005
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Re: Lay-flat options for the Guide
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Fri, 04 March 2005 01:44
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I took my book to KINKOS and had them cut the back off and spiral bind for me. works great
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Posts: 186
Registered:
November 2002
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Re: Lay-flat options for the Guide
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Thu, 24 March 2005 08:46
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OK. OK.
For the next edition, I promise a lay-flat option in addition to the hard and soft cover books. It will either be in the form of unbound signatures of the guide and the cover sheets, all punched with three-ring binder holes (you provide the binder) or spiral bound. Any suggfestions?
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Posts: 1
Location: Boat is at Robinhood this...
Registered:
May 2005
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Re: Lay-flat options for the Guide
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Fri, 13 May 2005 14:20
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I did the Kinko's three ring binder thing with the first edition of the cruising guide that we owned. It has all of the original handwritten annotations that we made and we keep it on board for reference. We keep an bound updated new edition on board for use in the cockpit and put any new harbor information in the binder with the old edition in the section for the appropriate harbor or area.
We did the same thing with our chartpak - cut it from the spiral binder - took it to Kinkos and had it laminated, punched holes in the pages and have binder rings holding the pages together down below. We pull out the appropriate page and keep it in the cockpit while under way....A few pages have become pretty tattered in the six years that we have had this Chart-Pak but we can't complain.
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Posts: 186
Registered:
November 2002
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Posts: 3
Location: VT (winter) ME (Summer)
Registered:
January 2008
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Re: Lay-flat options for the Guide
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Fri, 22 February 2008 18:44
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Curtis:
I just typed a long reply in support of this idea then lost it :-( Lucky you! Here is the short version :-)
It's a great idea with numerous advantages:
1. Lay flat
2. Updateable with replacement pages delivered over the net.
3. Allows user to add pages with notes and maplets.
4. Allows you to provide replacement pages for those damaged to registered owners
5. Allows for two user supplied binders. On deck would contain only local area of interest, the rest could be in the archive binder below decks.
Suggestions:
1. Print on waterproof paper. In addition it's stronger and less likely to tear out. Users can also get the paper if they wish. Google waterproof paper to find the source. ( I tried to copy the URL but failed)
2. Consider how formating might be different to accommodate the advantages.
I'm sold. When can I place an order? :-)
Doug Hall
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