Stupid publishing question!

[theweaselking]

Was watching a movie, and saw a stack of obviously fake hardcover books in a rack. Like, "Danny Devito's character wrote it" books, with his face on the cover.

Obviously, they just printed up a bunch of fake dust jackets and stuck 'em on real books. But it struck me: Dust jackets need to fit. So they'd need to know which book they were re-covering, or at least how many pages it had. And that led me to wonder, do they actually do that? Figure out how thick a book is going to be and adjust the dust jacket accordingly? Or is there a standard dust jacket size, that happens to have extra margin space on the internal flaps to allow it to fold nicely around books of any standard size, and thicker books just wind up with thinner internal flaps?

I suppose I could yank a bunch of hardcovers off the shelf, strip the dust jackets, and check, but that seems like more work than just Asking The Tubes.

So, lazyweb, help me: How do publishers figure out how big to make the dust jackets on books?

Comments

[iblis-kukl.livejournal.com]

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

I think it's done specifically to the book -- there are height and other design elements to consider.

For the movie, they probably have books around the prop department for which the sizes are known.

[tisiphone.livejournal.com]

Publishers publish books in standard dimensions, except for thickness, but if you look at the internal flaps they do vary in size. I imagine there's a computer program that can do that these days.

As for the fake books, I imagine they got them from a prop department somewhere :)

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I imagine they got them from a prop department somewhere

Well, yes, but that prop department presumably didn't invent whole new machines and processes. It makes way more sense for the prop department to call someone who makes book jackets and say "Yo! Here is our book jacket design. Print us 40 and we will give you the moneys" than it would be for them to set up themselves.

[ambug666.livejournal.com]

Well, for the movie, they could have taken the original dust jacket off the book, measured it, and then made their own duplicating the measurements of the original dust jacket. That doesn't really answer your question though.

I suspect that book manufacturers have a standard table of dust jacket sizes depending on the size of the book. Those were probably generated back in the day using math and then eventually standardized. But I have no proof or citations.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Essentially: yes. There's a calculator. You plug the book size and page count into it, and it tells you how big the dust jacket (or for softcovers the entire cover design) has to be.

F'rex, here's Lulu's (http://www.lulu.com/calculators/bookSpineCalc.php?cid=publish_book) version of it. (That's a messed up direct link; to see it in situ, go here (http://www.lulu.com/publish/books/?cid=nav_bks) and find the "Grow A Spine" box midway down on the left.)

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

But the real question I mean to ask is, does the size of the dust jacket change, for standard-thickness books? Or do only the spine-printable and flap-printable areas change, because the dust jacket is of a standard size for standard page numbers and they just print different designs on standard-dust-jacket-sized paper?

And here we reach the limit of my knowledge

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Hmm. It might be time for what wikipedia decries as "Original Research". Got a stack of similar-sized hardcovers handy?

I think the bit that folds over the cover tends to be pretty generic, allowing for a certain amount of slop in that direction, so it may be there are a smaller set of standard paper sizes. That'd probably make production cheaper.

[dianavilliers.livejournal.com]

I would guess that dust jacket paper comes on rolls of standard book-height width, and is then printed, cut and folded to suit the book's thickness.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Hmm. So, a cover and two flaps would have a standard size, and the spine would have a calculated-per-book size, and then it would just be Your Problem(tm) to make sure your printer knew that this particlular book's covers were 2cm longer than that book over there?


That also makes sense!

[jazzfish]

I would bet that the spine-printable area changes with a certain number of signatures (er, that's 'groups of 16 pages sewn together') but I don't know if that number is one or four or something else. (One and four are my totally non-scientific guesses.)

[jerril]

I'm going to logic you into a corner: If they don't custom fit the dust jackets, why doesn't the book front art end up on the spine some times? Or the spine art and wording end up on the front and back covers?

Basically, it would look like crap if they didn't do at least some planning, and pretty early in the process too.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Ah, but:

#1: If the whole jacket is a standard size, the jacket *print* could still be custom made, to use a smaller font and wider flaps for smaller books, and larger-and-thinner for thicker books. Up to a limit.

#2: Much jacket art is wraparound, continuing across the spine and over the back of the book.

[jerril]

#1: ... I didn't seriously think you thought there were lots of custom sizes of paper. OK. Publishing thing: there aren't. They have a few, and they cut those up (traditionally into neat fractions so as to avoid wasting scraps but today we're more willing to just trim and pulp the shreds).

#2: And onto the inside flaps where the inside dustjacket info is instead of art?

[jerril]

This was supposed to be a reply to your reply. CURSES.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

#1: Custom paper size is possible, but seems unlikely for normal books. Hence my question, "ARE they all the same size?"

The design to print on the standard paper size, though, is totally customisable.

#2: Well, yes, but see also the possibility of "jacket paper is of standard size, jacket DESIGN is a custom file to fit that standard size, and the weirdass 1000+ page outliers like Sanderson and Martin get special treatment but that is outside the scope of inquiry."

[pappy-legba.livejournal.com]

"Wierdass outliers?" Sir, of the few bookstores that remain, the shelves of fantasy sections are reinforced to deal with the many the brick-sized tomes because apparently modern fantasy readers don't like editing.

And before doorstop-weight fantasy got popular, there was James Michener. And before that there was Russian literature and also all the people buying Remembrance of Things Past to impress their friends at dinner parties. Also reference manuals bound in trade-sized volumes.