- Exposed wire wire fully visible
- Separate front and back covers bound in with the pages. Cheapest, any shop, folds back 360°. Workbooks, manuals, notebooks.
- Semi-concealed loops show on spine
- One-piece wrap cover with the holes punched through its spine, so the wire shows as a row of loops. One bindery pass, opens flat, cover stays one piece. Punching and scoring have to register to the wire, so ask for a bulking dummy.
- Fully concealed bound back flap
- A second back panel folds in at the fore edge and gets punched and bound with the pages; the outer back, spine and front wrap the wire. Nothing shows, the spine prints clean, and the bindery does it in one pass. Needs a bindery set up for concealed work; ask for their template before you print.
- Tip-in wrap cover unpunched
- The bindery runs plain Wire-O with a heavy back sheet; you glue the unpunched cover to that sheet after. Any shop can bind it, the cover can be printed any way (letterpress, foil, offset), and no cover punch has to register. Trade-off: a hand gluing step, and the glue joint is the weak point.
All three wrapped versions give up the 360° fold-back and gain a printable spine.