Best print on demand publisher?

My experience with Lulu in Europe has been a nightmare. The print quality is not bad (if you prepare your files the right way and don’t want to compare with offset printing) but there is no quality control whatsoever and for now I’ve abandoned the idea of getting something right from them. They’re maybe more reliable in the US I don’t know.

Hi Wayne;

I have tried two books with Blurb last month.

~ I am not happy with the paper quality they use, I mean they are so far away from Aperture or Phadion paper quality.

~ I have had some problem when I ordered my books and had two-three days respond from support guys. They are not quite fast.

~ If you are going to order more books, I don’t think price is very reasonable. I use my books on portfolio basis so this is not a big problem for me.

~ They have three different size options I think the last one, 13×11 inch, is quite nice for portfolio purpose.

~ You gotta be very careful with colour calibration. I think I have a PDF file for blurb printing, I can e-mail it to you if would like to.Or do some search here on LS you will find the link for PDF file.

~ I had around 60 pages books and am not happy with binding.

~ You have black hardcover under the dust jacket so if you damage your dust jacket, there is nothing to do. But quality of dust jacket is good.

~ May be that is the quality I paid for blurb.

~ I can take some pictures of my books and can e-mail to you..

~ I think portfolios are really important so I will not use them again for portfolio purposes or any reason. I would go Fastback book publishing( http://www.fastbackbooks.com/) for portfolios.

~ It is worth to spend a few more bucks for a well done portfolio. Or you can print by yourself and have custom made binding and cover from local guys. I will try it here in Toronto when I got wacky dollars…

Ask away for any question..

cheers, A

Fastback books – for sure. Camille Seaman, the head honcho is a documentary photographer, and a member of LS, and has done great work for many of us – think she’s doing another workshop on book design in the next weeks.

office and gallery in NYC, also in the SF area.

I hear good things about these guys.

http://asukabook.com/

My experience at Lulu.com was very positive. Currently the books they are printing in the US are terrific. Keep in mind, however, that it took me a year to get it just right. If you really apply yourself for the long haul you can get fine results with Lulu. But you know what, it take at least a year doing a book with a traditionaly publishing house anyway.

I’ve just made a YouTube film about my book to try and enhance sales. I’m in the process of redoing the audio right now.

Yellow Belly Books

Here’s the YouTube piece (with the previous audio). Maybe it’ll give you some ideas.

Good Luck

has anybody here worked with asukabook.com? I am in the middle of trying these various options, found MyPublisher easy to use and the results not bad, marginally better in look than Apple, and MUCH easier to design. Am waiting for my first blurb book now. I do wish they had better customer service. Someone had asked for one of their rep’s e-mail before – can that be made public here?
Teru, regarding fastback, I love the quality of your b&w book, but am much less smitten with their color reproductions. Every one I have seen looks a bit flat and muddy to me, so that is a concern.

I really like asukabook. Their color is rich and vibrant much better with the matte paper than the glossy which is harsh and nasty. Their customer service is quite good, the upload can be a bit slow. Their color is much better than fastback’s although there are some limitations in page count that fastback doesn’t have. if you have a calibrated monitor, their color is very acurate, I’ve not had the same luck with a test book i did with fastback.

Asukabook provides you with a set of “templates” that are really just empty photoshop documents sized properly with guides already set showing how much is eaten up by the gutter and where the cut lines are on the pages. If you design in InDesign you’d need to output as an EPS and open in photoshop to convert to jpg in order to create a pdf that’s got data they need for printing. I just design in photoshop it’s pretty simple

Does Asuka offer books in a rectangular (horizontal) format?

Looking at their website I mainly see books that are square, which is a little odd unless you are shooting with a Hassy or Rolleiflex. ;-)

nice pics, paul.

Just another plug for Asukabook, the end result looks like a high quality coffee table book you’d buy at a bookstore. Great color-matching and excellent color on the 3 books I’ve done w/ them.

to answer Feli’s question, they only do squares, not sure why.

I’ve been using lulu for a while now but the novelty’s gradually worn off. I’ve been forced to going back to them because of the prohibitive costs of going to digital printers here in the UK. An 8.5”x11” 108 page colour book costs only £12 per book at Lulu, whilst the cheapest I could find in the UK for a maximum of 10 books was £60 per book. The uploading process can be a nightmare and you should put a day and a sleepless night aside to be safe. Their customer support can be atrocious too, with a live chat often with someone at the other end who doesn’t have a clue about the process.

Something I’d recommend lulu for is getting dummy books made up and for trying layouts out, sequencing, etc. Also, I guess it depends on who your client might be for a portfolio book. At £5 ($9), I’ve produced portfolio books that I’ve left with charities that I’ve gone on to work with. They’re not the same books I’d send to editors or publishers, but not everyone requires leather bound, polished portfolios.

Another plus is you get your own storefront (ours is at www.lulu.com/common-eye) which costs nothing and requires no maintenance. I’ve had people buy books from there though and the quality of the books they’ve received has been too unreliable to make full use of it.

To sum up, my experience with lulu is that the money you save on the product, you pay for in time and stress at producing and uploading it. Finally, I’ve had books that have come back with pages upside down, pages doubled up, and the best one, a book with my photobook cover on it but someone else’s Turkish cookbook inside.

In the words of my mum, “you buy cheap, you buy twice.”

I was quite taken aback at your experience with Lulu.com. What a disaster. I’ve been using Lulu Stateside for a while and have never had a major problem. Their customer service in my experience has been consistently good when needed, which hasn’t been often. I have one book publically available at Lulu but have also printed various other books and portfolios privately and after getting Woofers right (took about a year of tweaking) the other projects were immediate and straight forward. Mind you, I do knnow that Lulu have a huge problems with their European operation. I only hope they’ve sorted that out by now. I’ve had several customers order my book that would have been printed in Europe and they have not reported any problems, at least not to me directly.


The best thing about Lulu is that you can have total control over the layout and design rather than having to use templates but it does take a lot of time to get it all looking smart in terms of color and saturation but the quality can be excellent but that’s using their American operation.

Warning: http://www.myphotobook.co.uk/ provides reasonable print quality, and its easier and less stressful than uploading files for server processing. You download some software, about 5 mb, and create your book on your hard drive first and then either upload the book file or burn it on a CD and post it.

Here’s the warning: their software will NOT on my computer. I installed it twice, created a second duplicate project, exhanged numerous e mails which were rudimentary ‘try this, try that’ advice and, like an insult, the software crashes my entire computer and does it every time I attempt to output the final file. I nearly lost some irreplaceable work in a simple cut and paste operation while the software was working and then brought down my entire computer.

I agree about the control over layout and design, that’s a huge benefit over using the Fisher Price templates you get elsewhere. I guess the downside is there’s no quality control because of the “it’s all down to the user” approach. Have you never had the odd page printed upside down? The US versus Europe point may well be true – the first books I had printed in 2005 were much better than recent ones. Those were shipped from the US, the latter ones from Spain. That Turkish cookbook episode knocked the wind out of me though, especially when there’s noone you can talk to directly to work out what went wrong. It doesn’t give me much confidence to go back there, though I recently did just because of how cheap it is (even then I needed three copies of a book, got 5 printed just in case of glitches and wouldn’t you know it, 2 out of 5 had major problems – misaligned and doubled-up pages – and all from the same PDF file! The other 3 were perfect.)

From the buyers end….....I bought a copy of Woofers from Lulu (USA) and the transaction seemed to work fine. The quality of the book was good. I was a satisfied buyer. Ofcourse better photographs would have improved things, but…......juuuuuuust kidding Paul!!! Fine book.

Why thank you, kind sir. Actually John, you probably have no idea how appreciative I am. I’ve very pleased you like it. I’m just uploading a YouTube film right now in an effor to push it one last time before I apply my efforts to my next endeavor. I made one yesterday but my spiel was terrible so I’m replacing it. I wonder what kind of an audience it might attract. There are so many options these days to promote our various projects. I may try a podcast as well.

Again, many thanks.

I should say that when I said templates they’re not design templates, you have 100% control over layout and design with Asukabook. They’re just the blank pages pre-set for the boundaries of the page. They are NOT design templates.

Scott

Thanks wayne for bringing it up. I have just started to play with blurb. Anyone knows if the double page spreads are possible with blurb?

Try Lightening Source….www.lighteningsource.com .

Looks like it’s useful to try at least a few more of them. There’s something to be said too for those vendors who offer the less expensive paperbacks, which I guess you can use as proofs for the larger/HB versions. Thanks, everyone, for the feedback. W

just to throw another lulu experience out there- i’ve had mixed results. the first few books were fine- print quality ok for the price, but the last batch of 20 i ordered all had amoeba-like bubble splotches all over almost every single picture. and from one copy to the next, they weren’t in the same places. as a result, i seriously question quality control- there doesn’t seem to be any. my fiance also had major problems with crooked layouts on several books and gave up on them. i did have a reasonable experience with customer service and they agreed to reprint mine even before i shipped back the flawed ones. to second what has been said above, essentially you get what you pay for.

I have printed with Lulu, Blurb and AsukaBook. All of them tests… and AsukaBook is significantly better than the others. I didn’t think the paper or colors were horrible with Blurb, but the cover seemed cheap. Plastic feeling linen cover, with a thin shiny jacket that curled and wouldn’t stay on. AsukaBook had better color and paper, and the cover was heavy and well printed. It definitely costs more, but you get a much better product that seems like it can handle lots of grubby hands picking it up off the coffee table for years to come.

For my next project I will be using Asuka as the subject matter demands substantially enhanced quality over my Woofers book. I’ll order as I need them while selling through my Photoshelter account. It’s a perfect match. Coming to Photoshelter from Digital Railroad was the right thing to do.

Perhaps I should be clearer on this. Digital Railroad is brilliant. Absolutely no doubt about it. But the self-fulfill e-commerce facility at PS is brilliant. Why didn’t I think of it before? Now I’m cross at myself. Having said that, Lulu has been consistently good in my experience though I’ve not heard from my European buyers (there are so few anyway).

Things are becoming much clearer as to my plans for 2007 now.

I just wish Asuka wasn’t so hung up on the square format for their books.
What’s up with that?

feli

I must say, I’m coming around to the sqaure format. Plenty of white space for a clean design and equal size for tall and wide images. One no longer has to descriminate.

With all the problems people have mentioned with these print on demand publishers, it would seem that it would be much better in many cases to make inkjet prints on matte/art paper on one’s home printer and then have the prints bound at a local bindery.

i have a great studio in front of my house that are doing GREAT digital Xerox prints and binding, a book of A3+ size (roughly 30×40cm) on 250gr/m matt paper, hard back binding, 100 pages, costs 200USD, that is if you make just one. i have tried different things and just discovered these guys couple of days ago, awesome…and they get it done within one day. drawback: it’s in sarajevo, but all couriers deliver to/from sarajevo. and you don’t have to submit PDF, just numerated images/pages.

If I could ask just one stupid question, it would be: what is their contact info?

Interesting Ziyah. I guess I am going to try Fastback and/or Asuka first. . .

Fastback. NYC and San Fran (Berkeley)

You may also want to give Aperture 2’s books a try. You can now set your own book size and build your own custom layout.

http://www.apple.com/aperture/tutorials/#publishoutput-book

If that is not enough, Apple has also worked to integrate better with Indesign CS3. I haven’t tried this yet but will definitely give it a go soon.

http://www.apple.com/applescript/aperture/indesign/index.html

I just visited Lulu.com’s booth at the Paris Book Fair and must say that the quality of their prints has not improved since the last time I printed a book which is about a year ago. I’ve had many problems with them here in Europe and after talking with them in Paris I still don’t feel comfortable.

If you need a high quality book, I would search for a service equipped with digital presses like Kodak Nexpress or HP indigo. The Xerox shops (like Lulu) are good but remain in my opinion on the color-copy side.