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Examining the Era of Print-on-Demand
tonywong writes "Printing on demand is getting cheaper and better every year. The New York Times has this a review of sites that offer simple DTP programs for free to lure potential publishers. The article claims that the print run can be as little as a single copy on demand." From the article: "Blurb.com's design software, which is still in beta testing, comes with a number of templates for different genres like cookbooks, photo collections and poetry books. Once one is chosen, it automatically lays out the page and lets the designer fill in the photographs and text by cutting and pasting. If the designer wants to tweak some details of the template -- say, the position of a page number or a background color -- the changes affect all the pages. The software is markedly easier to use -- although less capable -- than InDesign from Adobe or Quark XPress, professional publishing packages that cost around $700. It is also free because Blurb expects to make money from printing the book."
This seems very interesting. It would be nice if they would accept existing formats as well as whatever is generated from their application. But I like the idea of printing low-volume books becoming cheaper.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
i dunno, being an old timer zine publisher (since '87) i still kinda sorta miss the days of the gluestick, typewriter and a trip to the kinkos (well, the one where you had a friend who worked the grave yard shift and let you copy your zine for free).
but alas, i must admit that programs like quark (and now indesign) have made things a bit easier... and well, the whole on-demand publishing like lulu (and others) have made the DIY publishing cheaper but also opened up "underground" press (aka small-press) to new audiences.
i mean, there was only so much you could do with your by-hand copied zine... sure passing them out at the shows and begging the local record store owners to carry them was great... but this on demand thing is, well... not only do you get the control (creative) but you also can actually (sorta) compete with the "big boys."
sad robot making broken music
Any professional writer will look at this and say, POD and vanity press stuff does not count as being published. And they will be right. Just because you can gather the scratch needed to print something does not mean you will find yourself on Oprah's book club. It's still all about distribution and marketing.
Now when someone writes software that will query agents and automatically keep track of responses and requirements for different publishing houses, I'll be interested.
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
Printing on demand is getting cheaper and better
There was a German transcription for DTP - "Dumme Treiben Plötsinn" (along the lines of "Dumbheads Try Printing"). So it is more likely that language and readability of printed matter will decline/degrade even more. But that does not matter, cause technical quality (10^y dpi, full colour) will be state-of-the-art.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
I played around with Lulu.com's print-on-demand service a few months ago; it was surprisingly easy. I layed out the book in OpenOffice, saved it to a PDF, checked it in xpdf, and sent the file to them. A week or so later, I had a hard copy with a professional-looking cover and everything. One thing to note before ordering from them: Lulu's 6" x 9" format is actually larger than most paperback books; if you want yours to look "normal," don't use it. Anyway, overall it was a fairly positive experience; I'd recommend them for low-volume book printing.
The software may be good, but output is still another matter. Print has been making great strides in resolution, but laser copy has a tendency to stick to vinyl binders and inkjet runs when wetted.
i'd like a tiny little 4 colour offset press, please.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...this doesn't worry me. In the slightest.
Just like home DVD templates, and all sorts of stuff like that, it'll be great for Billy and Sunshine to print the grandparents a copy of "Baby's First Shit".
See, the thing that software like this can't compensate for is people who can't recognize and don't understand what makes a project work. What makes it readable. What makes it attractive against all the other competition sitting on the shelf at Borders (or Amazon for that matter).
We're talking about near-subliminal things that create an impression of quality and expertise. Sure, time can be put in creating an amazing template that has some of these qualities, but then what do you have? A bunch of projects that look the same, and lack any soul of their own. Look at most of the template-built blogs out there. Boring.
I've done 4 books this year so far, and I average 8-9/year, so I feel comfortable evaluating this.
m-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
Since you can get a hardcover bound copy of your book this way for less than $40 a copy, this would be great for something like wedding pictures; you could print a few copies for parents and wedding party members without spending all the money you got as wedding gifts.
Have you read my blog lately?
As a student photographer I was planning on throwing a bunch of photos together and printing it via apple and iphoto. i looked into it and read some bad reviews of apple's printing methods so i decided to look more into the subject of print on demand. I looked at a ton of options and decided to go with LuLu. I layed out the book myself and uploaded it. Their site gave me a few problems with the formatting but a post to lulu's forums had that solved within a matter of minutes. So after printing a few copies I decided to make it a legit book and acquired an ISBN number for it right through lulu. It's now sold via their website, my website, a few independent bookstores, art galleries, and very soon, Borders and amazon.com. So as a result of using lulu (or any print on demand service) my photos are being seen all over the globe. Print on demand is revolutionizing more than just the literary world.
And the quality of the material. Writers -- especially fiction writers -- who self-publish do so because they can't get their work published anywhere else. And it shows; I've read more than enough overly-long descriptions of how beautiful/sexy/handsome/perfect the masturbatory protagonist is in the first paragraph of POD books to know there's a lot of dross out there.
And even the rare gem that gets through usually needs the guiding hand of a vicious editor. ("No, no, no! You will not describe her eyes as "obsidian orbs," no matter how cool you think that sounds!")
Blurb isn't for people like slashdot readers, trust me. You can get beter quality for less at Qoop, Lulu or even by going to the book printers directly.... But only if you know how to make a PDF, which is beyond the scope of most people... thus the 100% blurb markup.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
it just amazes me that the profile of lulu is still so low. vanity press companies have existed for years- squeezing big bucks out of want to be authors. look at how much money gets dumped into the 'be a succesful author' business. along comes lulu and practically drops every economic barrier to entry.
you don't have to worry any more about getting ripped off. write your great american novel, put together your great coffee table book, whatever you want-- and put it out there. lulu keeps on going but i really thought by now it would be much bigger than it is.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I've said it time and again: Your best idea, magnificently executed is the smallest part of a successful product.
It's easy to do a great print-on-demand title (shameless book plug...), and Lulu does a great job of producing the books, guiding you through getting you in the distribution chain.
But then you have to market, market, market. The books, calendars, etc. that sell best are those that:
Other than that, it's a long slow slog to make a buck.
Maybe try posting on Slashdot to get some attention!
If you know how to use LaTex, you could set up a lulu.com book in about 10 minutes.
LaTex has had a "book" template for years, and true to its purpose as "type-setting sofware" (created by Donald Knuth at Stanford), it creates an absoutely picture perfect document with chapter headings, and eye-pleasing margins and hyphenation. This is all done automatically according to the principles of typography printers have been using for hundreds of years (though of course they can be manually over-riden). All that is required is that you learn a few html-like mark-up commands to format your text.
I've printed one novel with lulu.com and LaTex, and the inner text was easily as good as hard-cover books from the 50s and 60s (which I consider kind of a golden age of printing). The cover though does require some graphic design skill , as I think a professional designer noted above (though lulu.com does have a gallery of about 50 stock covers you can use).
Also, lulu.com was started by Bob Young, founder of Red Hat Linux, because of the terrible experience he had publishing a book through conventional means. I believe lulu.com runs on FOSS software.
One potentially useful application for print-on-demand is the publishing and distribution of textbooks. The costs of dealing with extra unused books are eliminated, and customers no longer have to wait two weeks at the beginning of the semester for their semi-out-of-print book to arrive at the bookstore.
But will this mean a significant decrease in already overpriced college textbooks? Not a chance.
I'd like to live in a world where I could click on anything in a publisher's backlist and get it printed and shipped to me.
In such a world, we could try to pass legislation under which refusing to sell a book on a POD basis meant forfeiting the copyright.
In today's world things like "Lord of Light" and the Lensman series have gone out of print, and that is just plain wrong.
Writer Beware's blog linked recently to "Opening paragraphs of recent PODs that yielded an abbreviated read".
...all this makes me wonder why there's no Emergency Editor Squad (operating under the Language Police). =)
Easier, cheaper, and a lot faster than trying to find it in used/collectible, and in general, the only way any record company will ever make money off their content "in the vaults".
Of course, since this is rational, it isn't going to get done until consumer electronics companies start buying up major labels and look at their content as a way to make money instead of something to "stop pirates from getting into".
Then, there's film/video. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to get a DVD burned of ... anything?
There should be no such thing as "backlist - not available" in an age where all usable content regardless of media type is digital.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I believe lulu.com runs on FOSS software.
I think this is incorrect. Many people (including me) have had unpredictable problems with producing books from pdf files output by tex or pdftex. For people using dvi-flavored tex, the standard advice on the lulu forums seems to be to upload the postscript file, and then lulu's server will run it through Adobe Distiller before they send it to their subcontractors, who produce the book using proprietary RIPs. There may be a lot of OSS running on lulu's servers, but it's not all OSS, and proprietary software is definitely involved at various steps in the process.
Find free books.
A somewhat related issue is using a Wiki to prepare contents for a book. I believe that there is lot of future in this since writing is more difficult than formatting, and using a wiki helps to organize ideas and collaborative work (testing it right now).
./ reader went through the experience making a book from Wiki and could tell us how it went ...
Now, for MediaWikis there is a sort of procedure. The German Wikipedia community seems to have the best experience so far and some reader really have been published in paper form.
WikiReader Handbuch and a Magnus' magic MediaWiki-to-XML-to-stuff converter
Btw there is also the idea that one could some day directly produce PDF from Wiki. A script for print on demand is on source forge .
Maybe a