What I’m focused on is costs and prices: the costs of the various binding options for my book, and the implications of those costs for the price of said book.
It turns out that book publishing is also a business (Who knew?), with a tight relationship between publishing costs and selling prices. After getting to the “good enough”, “professional enough” standard, doing more is neither good nor professional. So although it might be cool to have a coffee-table-book quality for my book, it turns out that no one is going to buy my book for their coffee table. Go figure.
Somehow this reminds me strongly of Proposal Land, where I have had to rein in (or console) many an artiste over the years, trying to keep them from doing more than the activity warranted. Trying to help editors and graphics artists who are, essentially, craftspeople, come to terms with producing a time-limited sales document rather than an illuminated manuscript for the ages.
As someone said, “Take my advice. I’m not using it.”
Or as a friend noted dryly, “I’ve seen lots of book reviews on Amazon. Not one mentioned the book’s binding.”