On demand books

**D. Bryant** · 3-May-2009, 08:51

Originally Posted by Kirk Gittings

Does anyone have recent experience with this. Have the consistency issues been straightened out? A magazine client of mine is looking at venturing in this direction.

Take a look at MyPublisher.com. The quality vs price is very reasonable. A friend of mine has created some books with them and I was pretty impressed. They have a special running until May 11th, if you want to test the waters.

MyPublisher.com

Don Bryant

**Brian Ellis** · 3-May-2009, 09:13

Originally Posted by Frank Petronio

This is the place to go when you have extra $ burning a hole in your pocket:

http://site.booksmartstudio.com/

Frank - I went there and couldn't find much information about what would be required for them to print a very small run - like maybe 10 copies - of a book of my photographs. When I clicked on things like "Tutorial," "Freqently asked questions," etc. I just got a page with a headline and no text. Is that my computer (maybe blocking popups?) or have they just not gotten around to providing this kind of information? I also couldn't find any pricing information for that kind of work. When you say "extra $ burning a hole" do you know roughly how much extra $ we're talking about for a hard cover book of roughly 8x10 ink jet prints, say 20-30 prints total in the book.

**Brian Ellis** · 3-May-2009, 09:19

Originally Posted by Bill_1856

http://bit.ly/7LYBo

That link redirects you here: http://ezinearticles.com. In quickly skimming the home page I didn't see anything about printing books at that site. Did I just miss it or have they maybe changed their business?

**Frank Petronio** · 3-May-2009, 13:50

Brian - I think they want to engage you in a conversation, I think their books are typically in the $500 - $1000 range for one-offs, more like artist editions in book form.

**Brian Ellis** · 3-May-2009, 15:09

Originally Posted by Frank Petronio

Brian - I think they want to engage you in a conversation, I think their books are typically in the $500 - $1000 range for one-offs, more like artist editions in book form.

Thanks Frank. At those prices I think they'll have to find someone else to converse with.

**Dan Schmidt** · 3-May-2009, 15:18

anybody experiment with MagCloud yet?

http://magcloud.com/

**Bruce Pollock** · 5-May-2009, 21:31

I had a small run printed through Blurb and was happy with the first couple of copies. It was all B&W images and took a bit of tweaking to get the contrast and density right in Photoshop before the printed output matched my expectations.

After I was happy with the trial result, I ordered 10 copies and the covers came out with a major greenish cast all over them. I complained, and to their credit, Blurb reprinted them at no charge. The second run was fine.

I think the quality of the interior pages is quite good, but it certainly depends upon the originals.

**photographs42** · 6-May-2009, 07:32

Kirk,
I was pleased with the Large Format Group book “A Larger View” printed through Blurb several months ago.
http://www.blurb.com/my/book/detail/257631

I was disappointed that only 40 or so were sold and very little feedback was received from folks who bought them. I bought a test proof version in soft cover and a final version in hard cover. At first the B&W images had a slight green tinge but after a few weeks of “curing” they are very neutral.

Some of the B&W images were sent in RGB (yours was one of those) and some were in Grayscale (mine were grayscale). I didn’t change that. In the printed version there is no difference. More than half of the 150 plus images are B&W and very very few have any color tinge at all and that might have been there in the file if it was an RGB file.

If you didn’t order a copy I’ll be happy to send the paperback copy I have to you (I owe you a book anyway). Your images in it look very good to my eye.

As I understand it, each order is farmed out to one of several printers and there is potential for quality variation because of that. They do seam to be good about reprinting if necessary.

I am slowly working on a book of my own and am planning to use Blurb unless something better comes along.

Jerome

**Photojeep** · 7-May-2009, 11:45

One of my teaching colleagues prints a book based on images taken by students. The class is about documenting Las Vegas. All of the images are digital color and they use Blurb as the online publisher.

All editions have been very food. As far as I can remember there were no black and white images however.

From the few I have seen, Blurb seems to be the best.

Randy