A hardcover or hardbound (also known as hardback) book is a book that is bound with a rigid protective cover. Chipboard is one of the most commonly used material as the hardbound cover because it is strong, cost effective and easy to handle. Traditionally, sewn spine method is utilised which allows the content pages to hold strongly to each other before the cover is bound with the book. However, the sewing method is slowly replaced by perfect bind method, which is faster and easier to be made. Hardcover book provides a solid and strong structure which is much more durable than normal books. Hardcover format is frequently demanded by important formal submission procedures such as final year or graduate thesis submissions and governmental bodies’ (e.g. Jabatan Kerja Raya or JKR) projects submissions.

The common sizes for hardcover book is A4 closed size and A5 closed size. However, custom sizes are available. The size of cover is always the challenging part of making a hardcover. The size of cover must be slightly bigger than the inner pages to ensure the content pages are fully covered and protected by the protective cover. The second challenging part of the hardcover production is the wrapping process. The position of cover during wrapping must be extremely accurate to ensure the design is not out of order or alignment. In year 2020, most of the processes of hardcover production is done by machineries; this includes the wrapping, glueing and perfect binding processes. However, the quality control of hardcover making is irreplaceable by machine and has to be performed by experienced personnel.

Hardcover thesis is a requirement for thesis submission at most universities and colleges in Malaysia. A hardcover thesis is usually the final thesis hardcopy to be submitted for the final year project submission. Important information such as student name, title of thesis, year of submission are usually hot-stamped on the cover. The hot stamping process takes about 30 minutes per A4 page (given artwork without logo and picture) only. However, the hot stamping on book spine may take longer time to process due to the different sizes of spine of each thesis book. Gold and silver are the most common stamping colors for hardcover thesis submission.