Custom Hardcover Paper Options
If your hardcover book features colorful illustrations, cartoons, colored diagrams, graphs, photographs and other graphic work, we recommend printing on gloss or matte art paper to get the best results. Gloss and matte both have ideal surfaces for vibrant color and black-and-white printing that will make your artwork, graphics, photos, and illustrations really ‘pop’. Gloss paper is often best for books with full-color spreads, lots of photography or illustrations and less text, whereas books with more text and fewer illustrations may benefit from matte paper. Matte paper will still give superlative image reproduction while rendering the text easier to read.
If your hardcover edition is text-only or includes only a few black-and-white tables, simple grayscale illustrations, and line diagrams, we suggest an uncoated offset paper stock. Offset paper — also known as uncoated wood-free paper or UWF — has the lignin extracted during the pulping process. The result is a natural-looking, absorbent white paper with a good balance of strength, opacity, and brightness, which makes it ideal for interior text.
You'll need to specify at least two kinds of paper for your custom hardcover book: one for the interior pages and one for the cover. You may also wish to include end papers, which could be the same paper as the interior, or you can choose something different; a heavier, colored or textured paper, for example, maybe an excellent choice. Endpapers not only elevate the quality of your book at negligible extra cost; they provide an ideal space for autographing and adding personal dedications to copies of your book.