Printed Inserts
Printed Inserts are a group of separately printed pages glued into the book at the spine, to act as just like a bound-in page.
Printed inserts can either be applied to the book as a ‘tipped-in page’ or as loose paper inserts. In the book trade, a tipped-in page or, if it is an illustration, tipped-in plate or simply plate, is a page that is printed separately from the main text of the book, but attached to the book after is has been bound. A tipped-in page may be glued onto a regular page, or even bound along with the other pages after the main body.
Uses of printed inserts include color illustrations printed digitally, photographic prints or maps that are often larger than the book format and folded to fit. In notebooks, their use fulfills a similar purpose to that of the endpaper, especially where printed endpapers is cost prohibitive (such as on small runs) or where the product is an off-the-shelf item, and thus endpapers cannot be applied. Like endpapers, inserts are often printed on a different kind of paper, using a different printing process, and of a different format than a regular page.
On larger orders custom printing a book from scratch is always the best option as it is most cost effective. However, if you are in a rush or you’re interested in a particular style of book or brand that cannot be custom manufactured (such as a Moleskine or Leuchtturm1917) using a tip-in is the fastest, most cost effective and sometimes only option.