IngramSpark hardcover print quality comparison
There are plenty of videos out there that show you what hardcover print-on-demand books look like, at least at a superficial level. But readers see these books from only a few inches away. How does the quality compare to books printed by the big publishers?
First look
Let’s compare two books of similar size. My book The Gap Year is printed by IngramSpark, the print-on-demand subsidiary of giant book distributor Ingram Content Group. Brandon Sanderson’s Cytonic is published by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House, and offset-printed by contracted print companies.
If you look at these two books face-out on the shelf at a bookstore, here’s what you see:
From this distance, the quality looks similar. In person, the only apparent difference is that Cytonic has an embossed author name and title, with clear laquer on the author name and gold foil on the title, which make them both pop visually as you angle the book around in your hands. But so far, so good.
What about the inside?
The text also looks similar from this vantage point. Similar cream paper, similar ink darkness. Cytonic has 34 lines per page instead of 35 like The Gap Year, but that’s a difference of layout, not of printing. So if you only went by pictures like this, or YouTube videos where you can’t focus clearly for more than a moment, you’d think they’re essentially identical.
Let’s go deeper
All right, so what if we turn the books around a little? Here are the spines, viewed from above:
Now we can start to see some differences. Let’s zoom in closer:
On the left, you can see that The Gap Year is essentially just a perfect-bound book whose front and back covers have been incorporated into the stiff boards of a hardcover. The pages are glued edge-on into an inner paper spine, just like a trade paperback. Whereas on the right, the pages in Cytonic are stitched together in little bundles, then glued into a cloth strip that runs down the spine, a process called “case binding.”
So IngramSpark’s “hardcover” books are what they say. They do literally have hard covers! But the binding isn’t done the way you’d expect a normal hardcover book to be done. All the major-publisher hardcover books on my shelf from Tor, Orbit, and the like are case-bound.
How much difference does this make? Both books feel similar in your hands, and both lie open to the same degree. The case-bound ones are probably more durable, and you can see in the picture above that the connection between the spine and the inside of the front and back covers is tighter in a case binding. So there’s some quality difference, but it’s not enormous.
Dust jacket deep dive
Before we look at the inside of the book, let’s check out the dust jacket. It’s the first thing that the buyer sees, and this part of IngramSpark’s book is actually pretty impressive. When looking at the whole cover, the image quality is just as good as that of a major publisher. Take a look:
Even zooming way into a 1200 DPI scan, the two still look very comparable:
To see any difference, you have to zoom in far enough to distinguish the color rosettes, which are the patterns formed by the multi-pass color printing process:
Once you’re down at this microscopic level, you can see that the rosettes are more sharply resolved on the cover of Cytonic, whereas those on the The Gap Year are a little smudgy-looking. But that bit of smudge is actually more pleasing to the eye than the more obvious rosette pattern, at least for me. So for the dust jacket image quality, IngramSpark really delivers.
Neither of these book covers is truly state-of-the-art, however. A more modern printing process uses dithered placement of individual colored dots instead of a regular rosette pattern. Here’s an example, a 1200 DPI scan of a hummingbird’s eye from the cover of a recent Physics Today:
You can see there are no rosettes or regular patterns of any kind here, just roughly equal-sized dots at arbitrary locations. But hold on a sec! Each dot can only be one color, since there’s no such thing as variable-color ink. Just how many colors of dot are there in this picture?
Time to get absurd!
This is a zoomed-in 4800 DPI scan of another part of that same hummingbird image, which shows more colors. Not counting the white of the paper, you can see red, magenta, yellow, green, cyan, and black dots. And I might be missing some! So this is at least a six-color (hexachrome) process, as opposed to the more typical four-color (CMYK, or cyan-magenta-yellow-key (a.k.a. black)) process that we saw on our two book covers.
I’ve found examples of up to eight-color printing out there, which is pretty mind-blowing. But wait, don’t your eyes only have three kinds of color-sensing cones in them? What about—
Pull up, Red Six! Pull up!
OK, let’s leave a discussion of how our eyeballs work for a later post :) Instead, we’ll back out a little from the dot insanity and instead look at the fold quality of the dust jacket. This is something I noticed when I started unboxing my copies:
You can see that the inner dust jacket flaps aren’t the same length! The offset there is 0.5 inches (13 mm), which puts the front cover about 0.25 inches (6.5 mm) too far to the left.
By comparison, the flaps on Cytonic are dead even:
Though hilariously, you can see that they actually put the hard cover on Cytonic upside-down! I didn’t flip it for this picture—the pages inside that cover are right-side up :)
Having the cover shifted to the left also means the spine text is shifted down by the same amount:
Since the spines are only about 1.5 inches (38 mm) wide, being off by about 1/6 of that distance is definitely visible. You can see that the spine text on The Gap Year sits a little low.
This is only one sample, though. To get a sense of the average, I checked seven of my hardcover copies of The Gap Year, and eight recent hardcovers from major sci-fi/fantasy publishers like Tor, Del Rey, Orbit, Harper Voyager, and Ballantine.
IngramSpark’s flap misalignment averaged 0.25 inches (6 mm), with the worst being double that, and the best being a quarter of that. The major publishers averaged 0.0625 inches (less than 2 mm) of misalignment, with the worst being double that and the best being almost zero.
So dust jacket alignment error is definitely something IngramSpark should work on, since their average misalignment is about four times that of the major publishers. That kind of misalignment can make your front cover art and spine lettering look noticeably off-center.
Interestingly, the misalignment is always to the left, never to the right. So there seems to be some systematic error in their manufacturing process, rather than a purely random jitter that could go either way.
Time to go inside
Let’s get a closer look at the text that I showed earlier. Here’s the first page of The Gap Year, as you’d see it at arm’s length:
Followed by the first page of Cytonic:
OK, when we’ve got just one page, we can see that Cytonic is a little darker, but otherwise they look similar. How about if we… go deeper? Again?
They still look pretty comparable. You can see a bit of dithering in the chapter initial capital “A” of The Gap Year, on top. But both still look pretty good.
So I guess you know what happens next, right?
That big capital “A” on top in The Gap Year is only about 0.5” (13 mm) tall, so you wouldn’t normally get this close while reading. But you can definitely see that dithering effect with your naked eye. And you can begin to the the rough edges of the body font, too.
Let’s compare two of the same letter, a lower-case “g”. The Gap Year is on the left, set in Adobe Garamond. Cytonic is on the right, set in Monotype Apollo. Since the fonts are different, the exact shapes of the letters will be different, so just look at the black edges:
Now we can clearly see it. The The Gap Year on the left has letterform edges that are markedly fuzzier than Cytonic on the right. You can’t see this level of detail with your unaided eye at reading distance, but you can see a hint of the fuzziness, enough to clue you in that it’s not quite as sharp as a normal book.
This makes sense, as far as it goes. IngramSpark uses inkjet printing and major publishers use offset printing, which is clearly better. But why is it better?
Offset printing scans images onto plates in much the same way as a laser printer scans its print drum. And the resolution is often the same too, 1200 DPI (though some laser platesetters can output 2400 DPI or even 4800 DPI at lower speeds). So you might expect the quality to be similar, too. But look at this:
Left is The Gap Year hardback, inkjet printed. The center is The Gap Year paperback, which Amazon KDP does with laser printing. On the right is Cytonic, offset printed. The offset-printed letters look smoother than laser-printed ones, even though they start with essentially the same technology! How can that be?
Well, that’s down to physics. In offset printing, the letters are formed on a smooth plate using wet ink, where surface tension can pull the letter edges into smooth curves. Then the resulting image is then impressed onto dry paper. Whereas in inket printing, each little ink dot goes right onto dry paper. The dots can each spread out a little (a process called dot gain), but they can’t join up as a smooth surface, because they’re too busy getting wicked away.
In laser printing, the ink is never liquid at all, it’s tiny dry grains of positively-charged black toner. The toner grains stick to negatively-charged areas on a print drum, which are created by laser scanning. Then the toner is fused to dry paper with a hot wire, creating that burning smell we’re all familiar with. Toner grains don’t get the same surface tension effect as wet ink, because they all have the same charge, which tries to push them apart.
Conclusions
So what have we learned from all this? Aside from many reasons why I’m a pain to work with :)
To the naked eye, at arm’s length, IngramSpark hardcovers look almost as good as those of major publishers. The image quality of the covers is almost identical, unless you have a loupe handy.
IngramSpark shows a little dust jacket misalignment, and a little text fuzziness inside. Both are noticeable, but neither is outrageous.
IngramSpark uses inkjet printing for its interiors, which gives gray tones a dithered look, and letters slightly rough edges. Major publishers tend to avoid gray tones inside their books, but if they use them, they’re dithered more finely. We’ll see an example of this in a later post, where we compare IngramSpark to Amazon KDP print quality, and discuss dithering versus halftoning.
Amazon KDP uses laser printing for its interiors, which gives sharper letter edges than IngramSpark, but still not quite as sharp as those of major publishers.