Hardcover

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A hardcover (or hardback or hardbound) is a book bound with rigid protective covers (typically of cardboard covered with cloth, heavy paper, or sometimes leather). They may have flexible sewn spines which allow the book to lie flat on a surface when opened, although most modern commercial hardcover books have glued spines.

Hardcover books are often printed on acid-free paper, and are much more durable than paperbacks, which have flexible, easily damaged paper covers and glued spines. Hardcover books are also marginally more expensive to manufacture and usually much more to purchase. Hardcovers frequently come with artistic dust jackets. If brisk sales are anticipated, a hardcover edition of a book is typically released first, followed by a "trade" paperback edition (same format as hardcover) the next year. This method of sale is used for a higher initial profit on the books, as hardcovers are, due to their apparently higher cost in materials, able to be understandably marked up more than paperback editions in the eyes of most consumers. For very popular books these sales cycles may be extended, and followed by a mass market paperback edition typeset in a more compact size and printed on thinner, less durable paper. This is intended to, in part, prolong the life of the immediate buying boom that occurs for some best sellers. After the attention to the book has subsided, a lower cost version, the paperback, is released to entice further sales. This makes hardcover books a good example of price discrimination whereby the hardback version of a book is sold to those consumers with low elasticity of demand and the paperbacks sold to those with far greater elasticities whilst marginal costs to the publisher remain very similar.