Thread: Putting together a book

We do everything through Publisher. I've had printers say it is crap, useless, won't tough it, not interested, etc, etc.

I found a printer who would look at my files and he was amazed. We send everything to him via the internet, pre formatted in .pdf form through a third party pdf courier. This way we lose no quality keep all the formatting, have no problems with font etc. Mostly it just gets put into the rip and printed with maybe a couple of minutes to set up the A5 book to print on A3 other than that it is pretty much a seamless process.

I do it all myself and over the last 15 yrs have tried a number of other programs with a lot less success, a lot more hard work and stress setting them up and no where near as good a result.

Up until 2 1/2 years ago we had over $75,000 worth of printing done by this guy each year for 5 years, because he opened his mind to something else. That's over $1,400 a week that this person would never have had if it wasn't for Publisher. This saved us around $15-20.000 per year on what we had formerly been spending.

Now we print everything except for the book in house at a saving of around $26,000 a year. We have the ability to print the book (including Guillotine, binder, etc) but not the time, so leave that with the printer, but all our labels brochures, info sheets etc are done in house and with the new printer I picked up today I will be able to print around 1,500 of our new wrap around, full colour, high gloss, labels in 10 minutes. I can print 5,880 of the old labels in the same time. All from publisher. Sorry bragging a bit here, but hey I'm a new dad so I'm aloud.

Publisher may not be the best, but I still believe it's a far better alternative to Word for a book, especially a self published one. It's also readily available, reasonably cheap (compared to others) and is extremely easy to use. Some others almost require a uni degree to use (might be better now but they weren't a few years ago when I dumped them all for what works seamlessly for me).

It can be made into rather fine strawberry jam if you are prepared to do it all yourself and do it right.

I like it. It works exceptionally well for me. It works equally well for my printer. It will work well for others too if they are given the right stuff to work with in the first place and not pig poo.

Cheers - Neil

PS Most printers will disagree but then again there are quite a few still using antiquated printing methods.

I would like to put a word in for Publisher also. Like Neil says it is easy to use very functional and as he says readily available. I use it as a Cad program and I can produce drawings equally as good as any cad program. I use it for business cards, brochures etc that I print myself.

A bit off the subject, if you ever have the need to produce an electronic book try this...

http://flipalbum.com/fahome/

I had the need to produce a book with the original documents on one page and the english translation on the facing page and used FA. Fairly intuitive and nice to use for those reading it, just like a real book.

If you are only going to do a small run, the best way I have found of publishing books thus far is Blurb.

It takes about ten days from order to delivery, and the print quality is up there. Download the software, and see if any of the templates work for you, it's dead easy to use, Pictures are printed at 300 dpi, however the templates simply tell you the optimum pixel size for each.

It's really publishing for dummies, but gives a professional result.

It's no substitute for the sort of printing Neil's doing, but I now do photo albums for instance as hard bound books. Cost for about 100 pages (usually I have over 200 pics in that size) hard bound with printed cover is around $40 AUD delivered.

That's a bit less than I used to pay for cloth binding here.

Cheers,

P

Originally Posted by ubeaut

We do everything through Publisher. I've had printers say it is crap, useless, won't tough it, not interested, etc, etc.

I found a printer who would look at my files and he was amazed. We send everything to him via the internet, pre formatted in .pdf form through a third party pdf courier. This way we lose no quality keep all the formatting, have no problems with font etc. Mostly it just gets put into the rip and printed with maybe a couple of minutes to set up the A5 book to print on A3 other than that it is pretty much a seamless process.

As the proprieter of a print shop I have to agree with Geoff. What you have done is perfect Neil, PDF is the way to go nowadays, there are a bunch of converters all with their own strengths and weaknesses. PDF995 is good and free.

Sebastiaan