Why did my hardcover text move?
If you switched a book to case laminate and your back cover text and front cover artwork moved sideways, that was us. Here is what happened and why.
A hardcover's cover is not its page
A paperback is simple: the cover is a sheet of card the same size as the page, and what you design is what you see.
A case laminate hardcover is not. One printed sheet wraps around a stiff board, and it does two things a paperback cover never does:
- At the outer edge the board sticks out past your pages, and the sheet folds around it and is glued down inside the book. You never see that folded strip again.
- Beside the spine the sheet creases into a groove — the channel that lets the cover swing open. You do see the groove. It is part of the front of the book. But it is a crease, so art there bends and text there is hard to read.
The numbers, for a 5.5 × 8.5 hardcover
Measured off the printers' own templates:
| Part of the sheet | IngramSpark | Amazon KDP | Do you see it? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Turn-in (folds inside) | 0.625″ | 0.591″ | No |
| Groove | 0.500″ | 0.394″ | Yes — but it's a crease |
| Flat board | 5.315″ | 5.303″ | Yes |
| Your cover | 5.815″ | 5.697″ | Groove + board |
The one thing to take from that table: your cover is wider than your page. Your page is 5.5″. The cover is about 3/16″ to 5/16″ wider, because the board has to stick out past the pages to protect them.
And all of that extra width is on the outer side — the spine side can't grow, the spine is already there. So the middle of your cover sits a little further from the spine than the middle of your page does: 0.16″ on IngramSpark, 0.10″ on KDP.
What that means for your layout
Text centered on your page prints slightly toward the spine on the finished book. So we center it on the cover instead — your back cover text, barcode, publisher logo, front cover title and any layers you have added.
Two things this does not change:
- The size of the file. The wrap is exactly the dimensions your printer asks for, before and after. This was never a rejection risk, only a centering one.
- Your other formats. Paperback and dust jacket are untouched. A dust jacket wraps over the case and has flaps instead of a groove, so its visible face genuinely is the page.
Where the cover starts
It starts at the fold — the corner where the spine ends and the front of the book begins — not at the edge of the flat board. The groove sits between the two, and it faces the reader just like the board does.
That matters more than it sounds. Amazon's own product image for a hardcover is a crop of your cover file running from that fold out to the edge of the board. If your title is centered on the flat board only, ignoring the groove, it shows up visibly off-center in the thumbnail on your book's listing page — and on the book in someone's hands.
We got this wrong until September 2026, and titles printed up to a fifth of an inch too far from the spine. If you exported a case laminate cover before then and have not uploaded it yet, open the book and export it again.
Seeing it while you work
Turn on Show trim & fold guides in the Export section. On a case laminate:
- The blue dotted lines mark your cover — from the turn-in fold out at the edge, to the fold at the spine. Center things between those.
- Pale blue shading marks the two places to keep type out of: the border all the way around, which folds inside, and a band beside the spine, which is the groove. The groove is inside your cover and shaded, and both are true: it is seen, so it counts for centering, but it is creased, so nothing important goes in it.
On a paperback the dotted lines mark the page, because on a paperback the page is the cover. On a case laminate the page is buried under the board and isn't something you can see, so the lines mark the cover instead.