Printing and bookbinding should try harder to compete with online. Some books do a good job of staying flat, some don’t. The two books I bought last week are examples of good and bad.
Good: Hudson book. Sewn signatures, wide pages. It fits in my bookholder and lays flat without constant active intervention. It’s passive.
Bad: A book on medieval illustrations. Fat paperback bound with glue. It doesn’t want to stay open, doesn’t want to lay flat. It’s active. I can’t open it far enough to read properly without breaking the glue. After you break the glue in this type of book, it happily opens to the broken page but still refuses to stay open at any other page.
Best: Before books started to move online, other forms of binding were growing more popular. Lab workbooks and some user manuals were bound with a set of plastic rings like these:
I had to look up the name: Binding Combs. They’re still easily available, and the machine to punch the holes is also available.
Disadvantage: A comb book doesn’t fit neatly in a bookshelf because the comb is slightly fatter than the pages. This could be solved by fastening the backside of the comb to a hardback spine that encloses the soft part when it’s in the shelf. The outer case would also protect and stiffen the inner part without losing the lay-flat quality.
It might look like this:
Closeup of the structure:
Polistra's Mill 