(#4 Yuji Iwahara) These covers glow in the dark!

I've realized that a lot of covers I could talk about differ in the key aspect that they are usually made by the series' artist, not an artist at a publishing firm. Like, Monogatari covers are all drawn by VOFAN, who also does art that appears within the novels. So while a lot of manga, for instance, have pretty sick covers, a lot of the time they're simply character art. Nice looking character art, but usually not much more is going on. As for book construction itself, manga is printed pretty cheaply. It's meant to be cheap. However, translated manga in the States costs 2-4 times more than its Japanese equivalent, and while there's probably more to that increased cost than just print quality, it certainly is a factor.

One instance of US publishing going harder than the original Japanese publication is with Yen Press's English publication of Yuji Iwahara's Dimension W. Every single book in the series glows in the dark.

       

It's a pretty neat feature, especially with how the plot is centered around energy. (An additional dimension of pure energy, Dimension W, is discovered, and pieces of technology called Coils are able to take energy from that dimension, resulting in seemingly limitless energy.)

A lot the time English publishers don't go the extra step to do something neat, they usually just make the book bigger, print a sturdier copy, and jack up the price. But sometimes something cool is done (like we saw with Tezuka Osamu's Buddha series in that Ted Talk).