Checking in on on-demand book printing

[David R Munson]

What are the current decent services available for on-demand book printing? Also, how would you rank them in terms of quality of the product? I know this is covered in the archives to some extent, but this is presently something that is changing enough to warrant a periodic review. Personally, I'm familiar with Lulu and Sharedink, but what other options are there?

[IanG]

David a revue of these services would be extremely useful, I've downloaded some software from a couple of UK services today. Not asking you to do the revue :-)

In the past for work I've had catalogues made by a UK franchise print house, Prontaprint, and obtained superb results from a high end Xerox laser printer. The last time I used them they had just upgraded to a new printer, a Canon I think and the results were stunning. I had thought the Xerox good, but the Canon was as far better as good as the best 4 colour litho I've seen.

My guess is these online companies have to be using similar technology, which would indicate that most towns/cities will have suitable services, it's only the binding which is specialised, if you want more than spiral bound. All or rather most of these high end printers will print double sided and collate automatically

I've been supplying printers with pre-press PDF's for sometime now with consistently good print quality. I'm assuming that the software used by Lulu, Blurb etc is doing the same. I've always exported my PDF's from CorelDraw, but theres plenty of other software.

My printer will give excellent discounts for quantities, the wastage on one off's etc is high, once the printer is set for one page, colour/density finely adjusted he can just leave the machine running. S it may be worth talking top someone locally that awy you'd have greater control of your book.

Ian

[IanG]

A follow up David.

I've been doing some research and came across an excellent short article Blurb * Lulu (http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/001520.php)

The Blurb site's interesting particularly if you search through and preview some of the photography book, it becomes quickly apparent how not to layout a book :-) Only a handful look good !

Ian