**TL;DR As much as it pains me to say it , ring bound sketchbooks are better than book bound sketchbooks.** Book bound sketchbooks are gorgeous but impractical. Their appeal is in the way they present your work: like a published volume to be handled carefully, with respect. It rarely turns out that way. They do not lie flat. The first page is indeed like the first page of a book- beautiful and crisp- but the weight of the first leaf of paper creates a hard fold against the inner seam which gets progressively more pronounced the further into the sketchbook you work. It doesn’t look great; the page isn’t straight and you lose drawing surface due to the depth of the fold. The alternative is to look for a lower gsm paper. Then the problem becomes the thinness of the page: it buckles under any wet media and god forbid you want to use anything other than pencil to draw. Even biro shows right through to the other side, forget about markers. All of this can be avoided by plumping for a ring bound sketchbook. They might not be pretty but they are indeed practical. Need to scan something? Rip it out. Need to use markers? Rip it out. Made a mistake so big you can’t bear to look at it? Rip it out. No one will be any the wiser. Ugly but effective.

I disagree only because the wire of ring bound sketch books always got bent in my school bag! I found that with shoving a lot of book in the rings, if they were quite big, got bent and squashed making it difficult to turn pages. For me, book bound sketchbooks did not present this problem, but I definitely do agree that it is frustrating when you lose drawing space to a the fold on every page.

**TL;DR Ring bound note/sketchpads are a pain to use and therefore book-bound sketchbooks are preferable.** I’ve never used a sketchbook myself, however, having used both ring-bound and book-bound notebooks, I can safely argue that book-bound notebooks are easier to use. The ‘ring’ component of ring-bound notebooks simply gets in the way too much when writing (on the page to the left for right-handed people and the right for left-handed), as a result, it becomes difficult to write and handwriting becomes impaired. Moreover, pages are more at risk of becoming loose and falling out due to the nature of the attachment to the binder, as well as the possible risk of bending and damaging the wired loops.

Love how polarising this debate is... To hell with capitalism debates, or arguments around intersectionality... 😂