Full-color printing on silk? Check. Rust-free metal casing in place of paperboard? Already done. Bling-bling on the cover? A big hit last year. A plush toy to go with the book? Plenty on the shelf. Our point? The book industry is borrowing heavily from other sectors to jazz up its offerings. Nowadays, shimmery plush and metallic glint are the norm, not the exception.

While the concept of a book remains unchanged—the old faithful cover, text and spine—the amount of jazzing up to differentiate one title from the next has gone up several notches in the last decade or so. Think holographic effects, lenticular printing, foil stamping, glittering, flocking, embossing/debossing, spot UV varnishing and so on. For print manufacturers, there is but one principle to go by: augment existing technologies to deliver something novel and eye-catching.

"With competition in the book market so fierce, publishers, packagers and designers are desperately trying to develop something that appears to be different from anything else already out there," says David Pearce, who has been in the printing industry for more than 40 years. "In most cases, they are mixing and matching techniques and materials already in existence." And there's essentially nothing new; whatever is new is actually a repurposing or resequencing of the same old processes. It's all in the details, of course. Today, finishing means adding secondary processes and being creative in deciding which element—foil? ink? varnish?—hits the paper first. (Hexachrome inks over holographic foil to revive boring textbooks, anyone?)

And it seems as if there's no end to this pursuit of "newness." "Ways will continue to be found to add something to an existing product type. There have been, and still are, many instances of books being packaged with toys or other sourced items in a box to make them more novel items with a higher perceived value. A classic example some years back was the inclusion of a squeaky plastic animal or toy with a board book. That essentially launched thousands of squeaky lambs, pigs, cows, trains, licensed characters, etc., which a child pressed at the appropriate point whilst reading the story," comments Pearce. "More recent examples are CDs or DVDs packaged with the book." Well, the way PW looks at it: we don't ever tire of freebies. (That "buy this and get something free" bait always got us hooked, right?) So why should publishers hold back on them? Adding value by way of incorporating book-plus elements is happening in every product category. As such, conventional illustrated titles (read: those that used to focus on glossy photographs) now have a high labor component in their manufacturing process: glassine pouches with detachable mementos are but one recent feature.

Pearce, with his extensive printing experience—Hong Kong Government Printing Department, Hong Kong Vocational Training Council, Valiant Printing and now Hua Yang as its U.K./Europe regional marketing manager for board games—has definitely seen plenty in terms of products and gimmicks. "Nowadays, we're seeing lots of games or kits with books being packed in nicely printed tins as another interesting way to attract sales. For casebound books, in the past, a variety of items would be inset into the front cover—a velvet pouch for the tooth fairy, a small locket or a piece of simple jewelry, for instance." Now, windowed packaging, books with unique shapes, etc., are becoming a dime a dozen. That's not to say that popular gimmicks of the past are passé. They tend to reappear and become the next "new" thing (proving Einstein right that the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion).

Meanwhile, packaging is fast becoming an integral part of book production. Dressing up, as PW facetiously calls it, is nothing new, and art books are the best models. The latest gimmick seems to be laser die-cutting, which elevates the slash-and-show trick into an art form. Meanwhile, lenticular cover printing—yes, a whole sheet of lens material stretching from front to back and wrapping over the spine—is no longer a dream, though it may no doubt cause some budget nightmares.

As for pop-ups, the segment for which Hua Yang is best known, Pearce says, "Pop-ups and books containing mechanics such as push/pull tabs, changing picture books and carousel books are still popular and will likely remain so. There do seem to be mainly two classes of quality required: One is the better-quality products, which are not necessarily for young children but for adults, and they are likely to be retained, treasured and possibly passed on. The other category is still quite intricate and also requires deft handwork but usually contains simpler pop-ups and mechanics; these are for a cheaper market, to be read and played by younger children, and so these products will be subjected to rougher treatment. Almost every other year, we hear that there will be little demand for pop-ups, and yet they are still very much in evidence if you look around bookstores."

Amid all the clamor for add-ons and novelty elements, the components that make up a printed page—ink, paper and glue—have also evolved and improved, and they, to a certain extent, provide some of the "newness" that publishers and packagers are so desperately seeking. Take inks for instance: High-end inks, say, pearlescent, metallic, glow-in-the-dark, are becoming commonplace. It's no longer enough for inks to be hard-drying with good rub resistance, batch-to-batch consistency, press stability, stable ink/water balance and minimal blanket build-up. Now we have inks that supposedly make the color look brighter, prevent a muddy black appearance and ease matching of difficult Pantone colors. And, hey, how about inks that make colors appear to change before your eyes? Or those scented ones with fragrance oils contained in synthetic polymer microcapsules? For publishers and packagers, there are simply too many choices, too little time (and budget).

In recent months, there has been an influx of titles employing matte-finished high-density ink—with spot gloss—to achieve solid-color printing, especially in black. (Shudder, shudder: solid-color printing is a printer's worst nightmare, as errors such as hickies, ghosting and set-off are magnified tenfold.) Also seen is the clever use of a solid black background with spot gloss to set the microscopic details in photos in stark relief.

That leads us to the question: given the level of technology adoption on the prepress and printing floor, is there craft still in the industry? Says Pearce, "Despite the many changes I have seen in the print manufacturing industry over the past years, the advances in printing technology and equipment have, if anything, lessened the skill element. Much of the process has been elevated to a push-button or point-and-click simplicity. Perhaps the main area that demands increased skill is hand assembly, where careful work is required to produce intricate pieces on a mass production scale. I'm always full of admiration for some of the fine products which have resulted from meticulous handwork by tireless workers assembling hundreds of small pieces of paper." As expected, the craft-in-printing question is highly debatable. Raoul Goff of Palace Press—a company known for manufacturing and publishing limited editions and art photography titles of exceptional quality—insists that "printing is as much a craft now, if not more so, as it has ever been. The use of new technologies such as high-fidelity color, stochastic screening and special binding techniques, as well as new product formats—complicated limited editions and kits with multiple components—demand a high degree of handwork and traditional craftsmanship."

Craft or no craft, the role of a print manufacturer, in today's context, has expanded to include sourcing accessories, proposing new designs and products, rethinking the printing sequence and dreaming up novel postpress finishes. The working principle among print manufacturers, publishers and packagers alike is best represented by this rhetorical question: Where is it stated that books must come in boring rectangles with cardboard covers and black ink on white paper? For print manufacturers, the rule of business is simple: what the client wants, the client gets (provided it is willing to pay, of course). For publishers and packagers, the marketable price point is king. And somewhere, somehow, the twain shall meet. For the rest of us, we shall continue doing what conventional wisdom advises against doing: judging the book by its covers (and its packaging and freebies).