Paperback Book Printing

Paperback books, also known as soft backs, use thick paper or paperboard cover and are usually perfect bound (bound with glue). We use a 240gsm cover card which is wrapped around printed book blocks. The book blocks can be printed on anything from an 80gsm munken bookwove off-white or cream coloured paper to heavier paperweights such as 170gsm coated papers for photo books. We have a variety of paper types to choose from so please get in touch if you require anything not listed below.

Paperbacks can come in many sizes. Our minimum size is A6 (148mm x 105mm) and the maximum size we can bind is 320 mm x 320 mm. A standard printed paperback is in the region of 198 x 129mm to 216 x 138 which. These book sizes are the most economical for us to print and off you great value for your paperback or hardback book.

The type of paper used is entirely your choice (within reason). We stock a variety of paper that is suitable for paperback and hardback printing.
Some examples of the paper we use;
80gsm opaque
100gsm opaque
80gsm munken bookwove white (offwhite)
80gsm munken bookwove cream
100gsm recycled

We also offer a range of coated papers and various endpapers that can be inserted into your book.

If you are unsure about the type of paper you would like to use, or you would like to discuss specific options with us, get in touch for more information and we can send you some samples of our recently printed books.

For our paperback covers, we use 240gsm cover board; however, other thicknesses are available. After printing, we usually apply a laminate, this would be either a gloss or matt lamination. For hardback books we use a 135gsm coloured wibalin cover wrapped around a 2750 micron board or we can use a PPC cover wrapped around the same board instead of the coloured wibalin. We are able to offer extra unique touches to our covers such as spot UV, please enquire for more details.

Perfect bound paperbacks come with a minimum spine width of 3 mm, which roughly equates to a 36 page book printed on our 80gsm munken bookwove paper. The maximum spine width is 50 mm which when printed on our 80gsm bookwove paper would equate to roughly 720 pages or 950 pages when printed on our 80gsm opaque paper. Use our quick quote calculator on our home page to find out your book’s spine width.

In  paperback book printing, we use two types of glue; EVA or PUR. The EVA glue is fine to use for many of the books we print. However, we do recommend the premium (PUR) binding for books that have heavyweight or coated paper or colour books that have full page bleed on the text pages.