Have any historical groups or museums had experience with a “publish on demand service” such as lulu.com? Many groups own archival materials of interest to the rail fan community. It’s tempting to think that there are ways to produce revenue from the flotsam contained in all those file cabinets, banker’s boxes, baggage rooms and reefers.
Printing books could bring in cash, increase the base of dedicated supporters and further one’s educational mission.

Historically there have been compelling reasons not to publish, including the large up-front costs for the press run, a limited retail distribution channel, warehousing expenses and order-picking hassles. If I’m to believe the sales pitch of the new “publish on demand” outfits, there now is an easier way. Can an organization can get a book into print with limited out-of-pocket expense? Theoretically, orders as small as a single copy can be printed and then drop shipped. Ordering can be from a web site run by the “print on demand” operator, ISBN numbers are available and they may even have the ability to list the book on Amazon.com or other retailer sites.

Your experiences and thought are appreciated. Are museum publications a sustainable revenue source and how do new technologies change the economics of limited run publications?

Hi,
I had this question come up recently through my e-mail.

My Response:

Hi,

I have had both of my books ("The Gainesville Midland and Her Sister Short Lines" and "Civil Engineering for Outdoor Railroads Volume 1" published through Authorhouse.
(http://www.authorhouse.com/)

They are a print-on-demand and e-book publishing house. They started out with e-books and reached the saturation point for e-books. They then went to the extra step from a PDF file to have the book printed and bound.

As I could not afford a regular publisher, this was a relatively inexpensive way to get the book into print. I was able to get the book copyrighted through them and copies are in the Library of Congress. I have ISBN numbers so the book can be located and purchased at any Barnes and Noble or Borders or Walden books type bookstore.

That said, they do not understand photos and charts. I have B&W photos and many of them came out as dark blobs (I'd say maybe 15%). Color photos I had taken and converted to gray scale for the book came out just as bad. I have since found out that they know how to make books that are text only, but they and their printer do not make good negatives to print the book. A different negative setting needs to be used for good quality photo reproductions and they do not do it.

I started looking into Lulu.com, but they cost even less and so I think that they could not do better at printing.

Authorhouse has a color book option (more expensive) so I think that that might be better for B&W photos.

If you do contact Authorhouse, please use my name. If you do publish there, I would get a $100 referal fee.

I am currently contemplating using my HP business jet 2300 autoduplex printer that I use for making calendars and using the same comb binder I use for the calendars for the next book. I am not sure I want to do that, but I think that I would be willing to offer my sci-fi book to Authorhouse, but not my next history book with charts and tables and photos nor my next CE book.

I would highly recommend seeing an end result before jumping in. I would not hesitate to use Authorhouse again, but not for books with photos or tables.

Doug

Most DTP (direct-to-press) services do not use negatives to create printing plates. Rather, the scanned image is electronically etched on a plate (or similar printing substrate).

Books with a large quantity of photos, charts, sketches, etc., of varying quality need very careful handling as the tone curve (i.e., the setting for telling the computer "how black is black" and "how white is white") for each illustration needs to be adjusted to obtain the best quality reproduction.

This brings back to me the memory of a nightmare of a project early in the digital printing "revolution" where the b&w illustration proofs, printed-out by an author on his own office laser printer, looked fine. However, the printed images, coming off a printing press with regular ink, not toner, were horrible. The tone curves had not been re-set to accommodate potential "dot gain" inherent with liquid ink on a printing press. The entire printing had to be scrapped, the digital files were reprocessed with corrected tone curves, and the book reprinted. -- Ray

I have pretty much given up on taking anything "outside" since I got a duplexing inkjet printer, I find that I can print most documents that require small runs cost competitively myself. Through trial and error I have learned the best settings for grayscale PDF files with my equipment, as well as the proper margin offsets to get text on pages across from each other to come out exactly level (paper feeds top first on the front page and bottom first on the back page, so you have to adjust the top margin on the even numbered pages slightly to even up the text on the pages). The documents now look as good as the originals and are almost an exact size match too. I usually put GSB/Ibico bindings on them and have an electric punch and binding machine to do that. It takes a little time, but running things out to a print service takes time too.

As far as selling documents is concerned, if you are going to offer printed copies for sale then you might as well offer them on CD's too, and sell them on eBay. Otherwise one of your first customers is likely to be one of the pirates who is going to convert them to electronic format and start selling them there.

20 years ago I shot black and white photos of industrial machines, drew illustrations on them on my Macintosh, and had the images printed on a 2540 dpi linotronic. These when then manually glued onto text proofs for low quality reproduction for industrial customers. Five years ago I used various small run presses to do all of my advertisements, brochures, and manuals for my software products, many in color. The results were very good, and I can imagine the technology is only better now. You will be surprised to learn that most of your local commercial printers use this technology, and it is not necessary to go mail-order for this service. By working with a local person whom you can speak to, you can resolve technical issues. In my case, the leading blueprint shop in town is all digital and has a high quality color print machine, and they accept jobs online. I frequently ran jobs of 15 or 20 copies for instruction manuals with graphics.

It is important to format the electronic document properly for best printing. I used to struggle with image quality and file format before Adobe Acrobat became the standard. I used to have to download special print drivers and create print files on my computer for submission to the printer. Today, it is expected that whatever you see in the Adobe pdf is what you should get in the printed document. A couple of important tips:

- color depth of the scans is important, as well as density. Both are cheap and readily accessible today. I used to fuss over this, but today, with disk space so cheap and scanners so common, go for the max. Talk to your printer and ask what the preferred color depth and image density would be for your preferred print quality. When making the pdf file, note that there are quality settings in Acrobat as well. You want to select the higher quality prepress settings, or the settings requested by your printer. Black and white photos will be especially sensitive, because all of the detail is in such a narrow range of color depth. If you are printing B/W, monotone, pages to save money, you want the highest density provided, usually 2540 dpi. Your photos will probably look best at 150 dpi (256 shades of grey). Dropping to 120 dpi scans will nearly double your grey range, and may be better for shots with lots of subtle shadows, like locomotive running gear. The difference between photo density and print density provides for the range of shades of grey in the print job. The greater the range, the more shades of grey. A photo scanned at 150 dpi and printed at 300 dpi will only have a maximum of 5 levels: white, black, and 3 levels of grey. The number of levels is approximately one (white) plus (print density/scan density) ^2

-the only way to improve on this, get density and shades of grey, is to shoot negatives from the photo, and that is obsolete, or to print in color, even for black and white photos. The color depth allows you to bring the scan density back up without losing the grey shade range.

-splurge for high quality paper. "photo white" is an ultra bright paper that really makes your images jump off the page.

-muddy images can result from too many conversions between formats. Pick a reliable format. Scan directly to that format (probably jpg today), at the desired final size, and then place that format directly into the document. Re-sizing and re-sampling or re-dithering reduce image quality every time they occur.

-experiment and run proofs. Different software packages will interact with each other and you will need to test different settings. Scan an image at multiple settings, place all of the scans in a test document, and have that document printed at multiple settings. Pick the best combination. If you see no difference in the samples, suspect user error.

Having competitively printed for over 30 years and digitally for the last 17, I would challenge that your cost on a personal printer is anything less than five times the per page cost of today's typical high speed digital printer. Toner costs and pages per cartridge will hammer the personal printer every time. We often produce books for .022 per page digitally and .017 for larger runs on a conventional press. The cheapest studies I have seen set desktop printers between .08-.09 per page.

The ease of seeing what you designed and how it looks immediately is a big plus, but true cost should not be a consideration for comparison. We have developed a series of instructions for file preparation for printing including pdf "job options" and graphic file formats and resolutions that work best with the high speed b/w and color printers we use.

We restrict our services to paperback books, but have produced several rail related books.