Is there a concensous on who is doing the best, most neutral CMYK blacks and how the PDFs should be created? Because I know they aren't going to do anything other than CMYK and I have gotten nice black & white repro using CMYK on trad presses.
Is there a concensous on who is doing the best, most neutral CMYK blacks and how the PDFs should be created? Because I know they aren't going to do anything other than CMYK and I have gotten nice black & white repro using CMYK on trad presses.
Hello Frank,Originally Posted by Frank Petronio
Last time I checked on this, Lulu.com will do single ink run, which is black (K) only. If you find a place that does not do single ink, then avoid submitting to any place only RGB files, since full CMYK cannot be avoided from such systems; it is better to control CMYK in such cases. Best is as I noted in my posting above, adding a percentage Cyan to blacK for cool black prints, or adding a percentage of Magenta to blacK for warm black prints. Yellow is to be avoided.
All this makes me wonder how many places will take CMYK files, instead of forcing RGB. Trying to wrestle RGB into CMYK, and keeping greyscale consistent, would be really tough. It is my understanding of all these latest digital presses that just the calibration being off (a frequent aspect) could result in colour casts. Black (K) ink only is actually quite good in digital presses, though if you are familiar with traditional presses then it is not; the other benefit of Black only on digital press is that it costs less to produce.
On a traditional press you are lucky to get 320% Total Ink without warping the paper or causing problems. With most digital presses, you can use 400% Total Ink, since it is not really ink but toner and oil combination. Also, most digital presses do not introduce GCR nor UCR cut-offs on saturated areas. The set-up is completely different, and the files prepped for a digital press should not be used on a tradional press. Hope that helps a bit.
Ciao!
Gordon Moat
A G Studio
<http://www.allgstudio.com>
Here's a site with some information about the adverse side of print on demand books:
http://www.sfwa.org/beware/printondemand.html
I make no judgements, but it's good to be fully informed, in my opinion.
Cheers,
Graeme
Graeme,
For someone trying to publish a book for mass market sales, it is probably a good idea to avoid POD. Please take the following with a grain of salt, as the comments are coming from a writer who makes his living in th conventional publishing world.
However, here are the negative aspects of POD (assuming you're trying to mass market a book).
CONS:
1. You're on your own for promotion and distribution. No reputable book distributor will handle the vast majority of POD. The rare exceptions have been the books that were either so good or so cleverly promoted that they took off.
2. Getting your book into traditional brick and morter bookstores is virtually impossible. You might get the local Mom and Pop store to stock a few; but only if you float the costs for them until the books sell. Online bookstores, such as Amazon, are likely to let you post a listing for your book, but only if you pay them a chunk of each sale and then you STILL have to handle collections and shipping.
3. If your reason for publishing your book is to "get ahead" in the industry, don't even think about it. Traditional publishers don't look at POD publishing or vanity publishing as legitimate outlets for literature. If you list on on your resume, it will almost inevitably count as a black mark against you.
That's not to say that there aren't legitimate reasons for wanting to do a POD book. As a photographer I can think of several.
PROS:
1. A nicely presented and well-printed book can be an excellent vehicle for displaying your work. Especially if, like several of the people on this forum, you are both a writer and a photographer. You can do a Wright Morris type of publication consisting of prose and poetry.
2. A small booklet of images is a heck of a lot more impressive to leave behind than a business card.
3. They would make great gifts as well. So several of you can all put your work together into a POD book and send me copies to review. I'll get back to you with my opinions. Please autograph them so when you become famous, I can say I knew you when.
Since POD are toner and oil instead of ink how archival is this printing method compared to traditional techniques?
It seems there's a lot of interest in this. I started looking into it four years ago and at that time I thought the work flow would be photography>inkjet two sides on archival paper>send off for binding. This method still seems plausable.
The idea came about because I think nearly all of us would like to present short runs (mini-runs) of our work to family and close friends. Apparently, the people at Apple were looking ahead with their iLife software, which puts more media into the hands of everyday people. I know there's a 'garbage in, garbage out" rule, but some genuises are bound to flourish.
My goal with this is simple: Produce very limited black and white monographs on personal projects. Sales is not an issue, although I'm lucky to live in an area with an amazing locally-owned, and supportive, bookstore.
So, the idea of converting a 2200 to QuadTone and finding a binder service is still a possibility, but I predict I'll be able to use a POD service with decent black and white production by christmas 2007 or 2008.
Hello Ron Marshall,
The biggest factor is actually the paper, specifically the pH of the paper. There are more paper choices in offset press than digital press, though some cross-over of papers. With offset press, the pH of the inks needs to be a match, or compatible, with the pH of the paper used. In the case of a digital press printing, the pH is less of a factor. However, toner based colours do not stand sunlight exposure as well as some inks used in offset, so it is tough to generalize with so many ink choices now on the market. In a book, the internal pages would get little sunlight exposure, so not much of a factor there.
People using their fingers to turn pages could have more effect on the archival nature of the printed book than other environmental factors. Another issue is water, oil, or abrasion resistance, with digital press printed items being near equal of offset printing done to most coated paper stocks. It is more water and abrasion resistant than an inkjet print. Colour permanence is probably more of an issue, though consider that unless you cut pages out of a book to display them, we should reasonably still expect to be able to enjoy the images many decades later.
So would your book become the next great treasure of the past in a hundred or so years . . . too early to tell how well these hold up, since this technology is somewhat new and still evolving. I have seen that digital press printed items do not fold as well as offset, so this is another area of potential damage. If a book is well cared for it should last a long time; if it is thrown around, dog-eared, or poorly handled, then I think the archival aspect is not a factor.
To the individual asking about books done by inket, Taschen has done a few very limited large print books that way, and there have been a few other small publishers doing such books. It costs more to print many inkjet prints than other printing methods. The only real advantage is when you pass the size of traditional press papers to make really large books. Given something like a ColorSpan or perhaps a flat-bed or large UV ink inkjet printer, it might be more cost effective. Turning out a couple hundred books on your wide Epson . . . . I think the return on investment for time and ink expenses make this direction not the best choice. Inkjet, even in large industrial sizes, is often the most expensive form of commercial printing.
Ciao!
Gordon Moat
A G Studio
<http://www.allgstudio.com>
Michael, is there a difference between POD publishing and traditional self-publishing (with your own publishing company getting thousands of copies printed in China) with respect to that point ?
I don't see that operating Lodima Press has diminished the status of Michael Smith, or that West Wind Arts has ruined that of Christopher Burkett.
I would think that investing your own time and money in a self-publishing project shows a considerable measure of self-confidence in the value of your work, while designing and marketing your book yourself would require an equally impressive set of skills. Getting a book publisher is a mere :-) matter of selling them on a book proposal.
Now, if that's the case, what makes POD publishing different from traditional self-publishing ? You don't even have to disclose that the books were POD.
QT,
Actually, I wasn't too clear on what I meant. What I meant to say was that you aren't going to get ahead in the publishing industry with any form of self-published book. You can most certainly use it to promote your art. I've worked with quite a number of editors over the years. And on my website, I've interviewed about half a dozen or so editors of the smaller houses. Not one editor I ever asked considered self-publishing anything more than vanity publishing. However, that's in the world of writing; not art. And most certainly, there are stories of the self-published novels that made it big. I've heard of four of them so far. Four out of how many hundred thousand printed each year?
If you do get lucky and have phenomenal success with a self-published book, you do stand a much better chance at getting an agent. But that's not the point of this discussion, so I'll leave that for another time.
Nor did it hurt Lee Friedlander or Ralph Gibson - both of whom have been doing it from early on in their careers. In fact there is quite a tradition of photographers using a big chunk of grant money to subsidise and/or print and promote a monograph or two
It depends a bit by what you mean Print on Demand (as we have seen, the whole area is changing and developing rapidly), but basically what a number of photographers/artists are doing is establishing their own imprint (sometimes as a small consortium unless they have some of mummy's inheritance to support it) and using some form of POD to do the books - more likely through one of the more specialised POD setups or the smaller printers/binderies who are getting into this now.
As well as in effect publishing their own work, they are also beginning to establish the imprints in their own rights
(and bear in mind that few photo books is a profitable venture - so in a way, most of them are, in a strange sens, vanity publishing....)
Last edited by tim atherton; 21-Jul-2006 at 18:00.
You'd be amazed how small the demand is for pictures of trees... - Fred Astaire to Audrey Hepburn
www.photo-muse.blogspot.com blog
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