On standards and costs
I recently received Divergent by Veronica Roth, a book bought solely on the overwhelmingly enthusiastic recommendation of jmeadows. I'm very much looking forward to it.
But I'm going to use it here as an example of where publishers spend their production money. If you have a copy, go get it and then come back and read this.
The book is a smaller trim than the 6" x 9" standard hardcover. This saves some money, but I suspect it's motivated more by the classification YA than anything else. I don't know why YA tends to the 5" x 8" (approx values) or digest-size trim, but they do. It's one of those "we do it this way because everyone else does, but we don't know who did it first" mysteries of the industry.
Next, let's look at the jacket. The first thing I notice is that there's a slight metallic shimmer going on under the art. The jacket is printed on metallized paper, which is to say, the jacket stock is shiny silver like foil, and then they print the cover over this. There's a lot of ink involved in keeping this from looking like a true print-over-foil (see the first paperback printing of The Lies of Locke Lamora for an example of p-o-f). Anywhere on the jacket that they want white, they had to use a white ink to cover the shiny. So the title and author's name are printed in white--it's not the color of the paper.
In addition, areas such as the flamey sigil have a hit of white under them, and the overall art has some white under much of it to mute down the foil effect.
Now, it's possible that it's just a metallic ink or a true foil hit under everything. But I'm assuming the metallized paper based on two indicators: (1) The stock is slightly stiffer than standard jacket stock. (2) The metallic sheen is also under the endflaps and back cover, which you wouldn't bother foiling if you were just going to cover it all over with non-shiny. Foil is expensive.
Next standard: the case. Take the jacket off. Foil stamping on the spine is standard. Foil stamping on the front of the case is not. They spent some extra money for that. I don't know who provided the art for the front-of-case stamp, but if it was commissioned, that's a little more extra money.
It's a one-piece cover on the case (as opposed to three-piece, where the spine is one color and the sides are another). I would hope that it's the more durable weight of binding paper, but I suspect (based solely on feel) that it's the cheaper weight. I could easily be wrong about this; I'm a little corrupted from my current job, where everything is bound in cloth that could survive an apocalypse.
The endpapers are plain, matching the text stock. This is a less-expensive option than colored endpapers, and saves about 15 cents per unit. I happen to like colored endpapers and feel they bring at least 20 cents worth of pizazz to a book, but that's me.
The interior: the design is quite simple, as befits a YA science-fiction novel. They gave generous margins top and bottom, and the designer did the old-school thing that I hate, leaving very generous outside margins and letting the text get too close to the gutter. The old-school thing of "leave generous outside margins" dates from hundreds of years ago, when books were rare and fragile, and would be read by so many different people that the outer edges would fray. (This was doubtless aggravated by the whole you-need-to-slice-the-signatures-open thing of pre-20th-century presses.) But that's a design issue, not a quality issue.
However, there is one aspect of the interior where I say, "Why did you cheap out here?"
The paper.
When I picked up the book, I did that thing where an object is lighter than you expect and you practically toss it into the air because you used too much initial force. I dunno--the paper might be Glatfelter hi-bulk, which feels spongy but is actually pretty good stuff, but the show-through is kind of high for that (show-through is how much you can see of the printing on the other side of the paper). The copyright page does not indicate "printed on acid-free paper," so the text stock is more likely what it feels like to me: cheap groundwood.
I'll know in six months or a year, when the paper oxidizes (or doesn't).
They spent money on this book. Metallized paper is cheaper than foil, but it's not cheap, particularly when compared to the cost of ordinary jacket stock, and when you add the cost of printing a fifth color (the white). The front stamp is another expense. But the cheap paper brings down the whole thing. I wish they'd spent the extra 10-20 cents per unit and sprung for better paper.
I don't know if non-production people (other than swimtech, whom I have corrupted) will notice or care. I tend to think the package of the book is more important than people give credit for. A reader may not consciously realize when a book is well-made, but they notice on some level, in the heft of it and the feel of the pages. How this effects their reading experience, I can't say.
(Note: the author has nothing to do with these production issues. I'm still going to read the book!)
ETA: On further thought, I'm concluding that the text stock is probably the least expensive of the okayish papers. The cheapass groundwood used for mass market paperbacks is distinctly grayish, whereas the paper in Divergent is a pleasant, uniform cream. (But it's still too puffy.)