Black and White Photography Blog, Vol. I

*** UPDATE 9/14/2007 ***

This coming week should be the final days of all the book publishing testing. For the record, I’ve ordered books from: Lulu (a year ago); Digi-labs; SharedInk; Blurb; MyPublisher; and VioVio. Yes, I think that’s the complete list. So far I’ve received the Blurb book (which I had reprinted); and the VioVio book. I’ve been keeping notes about the various processes off-line and when this is all put to bed, I’ll post some sort of detailed wrap up (or check into the POD clinic).

With shipping, tax, and book costs, I’m probably in the $350 range for all this testing, not to mention tons of hours. I always consider this sort of testing a learning experience, and imagine that if I took a course in POD publishing, it would have been even more expensive. The only major player that I left out was AsukaBook because they are just too expensive for my purposes and I think are really geared towards people who already have customers lined up such as wedding photographers.

***

This is the last fragment POD (print on demand) post. I’m working on a more comprehensive post to put the pieces together as best I can.

But the reprint of the Blurb hardcover book (8×10, Indigo Printer, sRGB files supplied, b&w images) arrived today. The book that I returned was pretty magenta under tungsten light. This one is sort of purple (under tungsten light, and remember I’m only talking about b&w images here).

Blurb used the same files as for the first printing.

However, what was surprising was that the image on the dust jacket, which has lots of middle gray areas, (most prone to color shifts) is neutral with this reprint but heavy on the magenta in the previous printing. Okay, not perfectly neutral, but close enough.

The other issue, and this I don’t totally understand, is that the Blurb paper, although ever so slightly thicker than the VioVio paper (you’d need calipers or an electron microscope to see the difference), seems more prone to crinkling. In other words, when the book arrived, although I hadn’t turned the pages yet, there were slight crinkles, or indentations in the pages.

Again - not enough to drive you nuts or anything, but still somewhat inexplicable to me, and I would imagine that after being passed around for a while this ability to crinkle (for want of a better word) would be pronounced.

So I await the SharedInk book (much heavier paper) and in the meantime did a set of holiday cards with Digi-labs.net with their downloadable software (similar to what they use for books).

If you just read the forums or do google searching you’ll find people who tell you how pleased with the book (whichever POD you choose) they are; and people telling you what troubles they’ve had with the book. Some of this is quality control issues; some of this is level of expectation and experience. In other words - some people who are submitting files will know when artifacts are being introduced; or what happens when an RGB gamut goes to CMYK; and some won’t. So the input is going to be different.

Some people will compare the end products with expensive duotones printed in Venice, and others will be thrilled that their shots of the family dog are bound in a book. So again, the comments about output are very subjective.

To really test the POD people, you’d need an organization that could devote themselves to full-time testing. There are just so many variables involved, and frankly, you can’t always control the variables in the sense that PODs use different printing equipment, and different print shops. So consistent quality control is a big issue.

This fictitious organization would need to order the same book every couple of weeks to get a meaningful quality control data set. As mentioned before, that’s the nature of POD.

The only major PODs that I haven’t tested or ordered books from are mypublisher and pikto. Pikto uses a similar downloadable program as Digi-labs, and I wasn’t crazy about that program in terms of slight resizing of my files.

Anyway - that’s it for now on books. Will add SharedInk to my page about the PODs when it arrives.