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Book Tabs & Printing Tabs for Books

48 Hour Books offers custom index tab dividers to help keep your book beautifully organized and easy-to-use. Cookbooks, workbooks, booklets and daily planners often use page tabs. Available to add to any spiral coil bound book, full-color or black-and-white book tabs are laminated for durability and customized for your specific needs.

How to add tabs to your book

Book tabs come in "banks." Typically, each bank contains five tabs, but we can also do banks of three or four tabs.

To add die-cut tab dividers in your book, simply select this during the order process (tabs are listed under "other options") and choose:

  • How many tabs total in your book
  • How many tabs per bank
  • Full-color or black-and-white tabs

Once the order is placed, be sure to upload files indicating what you’d like printed on each tab divider page. You also can include what you’d like written on each tab in the "comments" section of your order, or send us an email or an order note with the information.

Tab design example

Here is a typical tab design used for a cookbook. It's printed black-and-white with five tabs per bank.

1

Determine how many tabs you’ll need by counting the sections in your book. Then choose how many tabs you need per bank.

You may have the option to choose from a few different bank sizes, depending on how many tabs you want total.

For example:

If you have eight sections in your book, you could choose five tabs per bank, giving you one complete bank of five tabs, plus one partial bank of three tabs. Or, you could choose four tabs per bank and have two complete banks of four. And finally, you could choose three tabs per bank, giving you two complete banks of three, plus one partial bank of two. The number of tabs per bank will affect the size of the tabs, so the choice is really a design option.

If you choose more tabs per bank, the size of the actual tab will be smaller. If you choose less tabs per bank, the size of each tab is larger.

2

Select either full-color book tabs or black-and-white book tabs.

3

Supply the copy to be printed on each custom book tab.

For example, the tabs for this cookbook are listed here:

  • Appetizers
  • Salads
  • Main Courses
  • Side Dishes
  • Desserts
  • Soups
  • Vegetarian Dishes
  • Cocktails / Drinks

We'll put your tabs together according to your instructions and include a PDF of the tabs along with your PDF proof for approval.

Note: When laying out your book, keep in mind that each tabbed divider page will need to be a right-hand (odd-numbered) page. Contact us and speak with our expert pre-press team for help.

Custom book tab pricing

Style of tabs
Cost per tab per book
Set-up charge
B/W, one-sided 35¢ each $50 set-up
B/W, two-sided 45¢ each $50 set-up
Full-color, one-sided 55¢ each $100 set-up
Full-color, two-sided 75¢ each $100 set-up
For example, for 100 books with five tabs in each, the extra charge for tabs would be:
5 B/W, one-sided 0.35 x 5 = $1.75 per book + $50 set-up = $225 total
5 B/W, two-sided 0.45 x 5 = $2.25 per book + $50 set-up = $275 total
5 Full-color, one-sided 0.55 x 5 = $2.75 per book + $100 set-up = $375 total
5 Full-color, two-sided 0.75 x 5 = $3.75 per book + $100 set-up = $475 total