UV Coating - A Book Cover's Best Friend!

Depending on which online book printer you decide to use, you will have a varying range of coating options for your book cover. Sometimes you’ll only have one option (personally I’d run screaming from that printer), and sometimes you’ll have so many it’ll make your head spin. And again, depending on which book printer you ask, you will hear wildly varying opinions on which is best.

At Steuben Press we consider ourselves straight-shooters about book printing, and I’d like to make an argument for UV coating not because it benefits us as the book printer, but because it might work great for your book cover. While it’s not always the right option, I believe it offers a balance of economy and style that’s difficult to match.

UV coating is a method of finishing your book’s cover by passing it under a flood of lacquer, then under an ultra-violet lamp to dry, and in the end you’re left with a really glossy look and feel. Most book covers are very colorful, and so this is a tremendous way of making your images pop and shine as you intended. In our pictures with this post you’ll see images from book covers that are only halfway coated. Hopefully you can see the extra zip it gives to a printed sheet that just came off press. Colors are more vibrant and the sheet is protected from ultraviolet rays that will degrade the image over time.

A similar look can be given with gloss lamination, and when my company launched this site back in 2014 I posted an article about choosing a coating for your book cover that argues the merits of both. While the linked article is still a good read, and still accurate, I was surprised reading it today how much it sounded like I was pushing readers away from UV coating.

Why? Because historically in digital printing UV coating is difficult if not sometimes even impossible. See, when a book cover is printed on a digital press the image is created on the paper using a wax-based toner. To give you a crude understanding of this, picture a colorful crayon smashed up into tiny microscopic bits then pressed and heated in an intricate pattern on a piece of paper. That's what a digtial press is doing. When a flood of UV fluid is sprayed on top of those crushed up crayons… let’s just say quality is a problem! There’s cracking, there’s scratching, there’s problems with adhesion.

Until just a few years ago, manufacturers who made UV coating machines wouldn’t even sell them to digital printers because they couldn’t guarantee it would work at all. And then came the addition of the infrared lamp. By passing the coated sheet under an infrared lamp after it goes under the ultra-violet lamp, there’s an extra session of drying that eliminates all our “crayon issues.”

Bottom line is, not all online book printers have this equipment, and so they do not or can not offer UV coating as an option for their book covers. Obviously at Steuben Press we do have the equipment, and we love it. Better yet, remember how earlier I said we push it “not because it benefits us as the book printer?” What I meant by that is UV coating is actually a cheaper option than laminate! So I am encouraging you, our client, to consider an option that will result in you giving my company less money.

In the end laminate will always be the most durable option for your book cover, so please weigh your options carefully, but take a moment to fill out our quote form at SteubenPress.com and see the price difference for your project. And give us a call to discuss – we'd be happy to help you decide and even send you some samples to touch and feel for yourself!