A Quick Guide to Book-On-Demand Printing: Learn How to Print and Bind Your Own Paperback Books - Softcover

Allen, Roger MacBride

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0967178304 ISBN 13: 9780967178301

Publisher: Foxacre Pr, 2000

Synopsis

This book will teach you how to print and bind your own paperback books, with real wrap-around covers. It discusses the pros and cons of other means of getting published, deals with cover design, page design, page layout and imposition, hand-binding, machine binding, and many other topics. Armed with this book, your existing computer and printer, and a few simple and inexpensive tools, you'll be able to make good-quality paperback books for yourself. The book also discusses the tools, machines, computer hardware and software needed for doing faster, professional-style book production in your own home.

About this title

About the Author

Roger MacBride Allen is the author of seventeen science fiction novels, including a trilogy of STAR WARS novels and a trilogy of Asimovian Robot novels. His desire to see his own older titles back in print led him to research the field of book-on-demand printing, and so to the writing of A QUICK GUIDE TO BOOK-ON-DEMAND PRINTING.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpts from Chapter One Book on Demand: What, How, When, Why--And Who?

The basic concept of printing books on demand is quite straightforward. The idea is to create finished printed material quickly, when and where it is needed. By printing only what is needed, and only when it is needed, the publisher can save a tremendous amount of money, and revise quickly and efficiently.

On a practical level, book-on-demand printing consists of using a mix of new and old techniques to print books in small print runs as they are needed. Typically, the book pages are produced on a laser printer.... The covers are printed on a color ink-jet or laser printer. The pages are then bound into the covers, either by one of several hand techniques, or with any of a variety of binding machines, and then trimmed to size with a heavy-duty paper cutter.

....On-demand printing is more expensive than conventional printing when measured on a per-copy basis. However, on-demand printing makes it possible to print books only when they are needed. Updated and revised or even customized versions of a book can be produced quickly. Because print runs can be fine-tuned, and because additional print runs can be done with little or no make-ready time or cost, the economics of book-on-demand and conventional book printing are completely different. In situations involving short print runs, on-demand printing can be vastly more cost-effective.

Instead of having a warehouse full of a dated version of a book, a publisher can store an electronic version of the book in a computer, and keep it constantly updated, printing copies of the always-current information only when needed.

With book-on-demand, books need only be printed after they have already been paid for. The economics of this sort of "just-in-time" printing can compare favorably to those of "just-in-case" conventional offset printing, which often requires that the publisher print many more books than are needed. Storage and shipping cost money, and because this is so, "just in case" printed books soak up working capital, merely by existing before they are needed. As often as not, they are stored, shipped, shipped back as returns, (or never shipped at all) and then discarded. There are many costs aside from printing that must be borne "just in case" someone needs the books later. We'll explore this further in the next section of this chapter.

Because book-on-demand only prints books when they are needed, waste is cut back. It can thus wind up being cheaper and more profitable to print books using this more expensive processes.

As we shall see, there are large and small-scale versions of book-on-demand. The term "book-on-demand" can apply to a commercial shop using ultra-high-speed printers and automated binding equipment to bang out a hundred books an hour, or to someone in his or her basement who wants to run off ten copies of a book, and maybe is dreaming of something on a slightly bigger scale. This guide will discuss both types of work, but is directed more at the home workshop. We'll also consider the various ways people in the smaller-scale end of the market can get access to the hardware used by the larger-scale operations.

....Conventional book printing is designed around the use of extremely expensive capital equipment (the printing presses) and very cheap raw materials (paper and ink bought at wholesale) to produce thousands of identical copies of the same book.

It is expensive to set up the equipment to print a book. It takes many of hours of skilled labor to design the layout, produce the plates used in offset printing, adjust the presses, and so on. That time and effort costs money.

To pull a number out of the air, let's say it costs $1,500 to set up to print 10,000 copies of a particular book. It might well cost that same $1,500 to set up for a 3,000 copy print run, or a 20,000 copy print run, or a 100,000 copy print run.

Once the presses are up and running, the system is highly automated, and a massive printing operation can be managed by a relative handful of people. Obviously, that drives labor costs down. The wholesale cost of the paper, ink, and other materials that go into making a book are probably the smallest part of the expense of publishing most books. The cost per copy of additional copies is quite modest. Indeed, publishers often worry more about the cost of storing books than they do the cost of making books.

....In short, it costs a lot to get set to print a book, but just a very small amount per unit to make more copies.

....Book-on-demand turns all this on its head. It uses moderately-priced capital equipment (computers, printers, and small-scale binding equipment) and reasonably priced raw materials (paper, toner, and adhesive purchased at retail or moderate discount) to produce books with a low setup cost and a moderate cost per unit (about $1.00 to $5.00 per book). Economies of scale are minor at best, but the initial setup cost can be as low as zero. Because books can be printed one at a time or ten at a time or a hundred at a time when and as needed, there is no need to maintain inventory. Updates and corrections to text can be made more or less instantly, between one copy of the book and the next.

Edition details

• Publisher: Foxacre Pr
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0967178304
• ISBN 13: 9780967178301
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208