SIC 2789 Bookbinding and Related Work
SIC 2789
This industry covers establishments providing edition, trade, job, and library bookbinding and related services, such as paper bronzing, gilding and edging, and mounting of maps and samples. The classification covers only establishments primarily binding books printed elsewhere; establishments binding books printed at the same establishment are classified in SIC 2731: Books: Publishing, or Publishing and Printing and SIC 2732: Book Printing.
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Tradebinding and Related Work
While some feared that the Internet Age would signal a decline in bookbinders' business, no such losses had been realized by the mid-2000s. The U.S. Census reported that 1,109 establishments in the United States were engaged in tradebinding and related work in 2005, employing more than 24,900 individuals. The future of the industry seemed dependent on whether binders could keep up with the rising technologies that were flooding the market in the early twenty-first century.
Bookbinding falls into several categories: edition (large runs), job binding (short runs), library, pamphlet, manifold (business forms or ledgers), and blankbook binding. Highly specialized preservation bookbinders usually attempt to restore original bindings of old books. Bookbinders are generally also involved in postpress work, including collating, perforating, folding, glueing, die-cutting, stamping, and other operations.
Three of the major associations concerned with bookbinding in the mid-2000s were the Book Manufacturers Institute, the Bookbinders' Guild of New York, and the Binding Industries Association.
Until the 1980s, few developments were made in the binding process, although more establishments emerged in response to increased demand for magazines and books. In 1988, Otava Publishing in Finland introduced the United States to a binding process called Otabind, which enables books to stay open and lie flat without damaging the spine of the book. The process was developed in 1980 and has since been used increasingly throughout Europe. Otabind has proven highly valuable to trade printers who produce computer manuals, previously made with costly spinal binders. The predecessors to Otabind were the centuries-old casebinding, wherein cases (folded sheets of paper) were stitched together, and perfect-binding, a modern innovation that applied durable adhesives directly to the edge of unfolded paper, replacing the time-consuming folding and stitching process.
Given the expense of new machines and adhesives needed to implement the Otabind process, it was slow to gain popularity with binders. In order to justify costs, binders needed to take on large runs using Otabind. This problem was reduced with the introduction of Rep Kover—meaning reinforced paperback cover—which uses cloth strips for pre-assembly of covers, allowing printers to send partially bound books to a binder for Otabinding. This has enabled binders to accept numerous small orders, adding up to a...
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