Electronic collating is the main benefit of digital printing for book production. Design your work so that on one printing sheet you have always pages of only one page number.

The grain direction

• The grain direction in the sheets should always be along the spine (long grain)
  o This way the book opens flat better
  o The book is neat and easier to handle

Margins at the edge which will be glued

• Easier to read
• The amount of silicon on the adhesive area is smaller
• The amount of ink on the adhesive area is smaller
• Minimum for the margin should be about 0.6" (15 mm)

Letter sized books

• The content is usually printed straight on an Letter sized sheet so that the print out is immediately ready to be bound
• It's also possible to print on a bigger sheet e.g. Ledger size, but then the sheets of course have to be cut before binding to a Letter sized book.

Letterhalf sized books

• Very easy to get wrong grain direction as you can only get one Letterhalf sheet out of a normal Letter sheet (copy paper usually has long grain)