self-publishing coffee table books (for PC)

[daneev]

hello,

 

so all my photo geeky friends keep talking about printing books with

ibook as an affordable way to produce bound

portfolios/albums...being a pc girl myself, i recently found

mypublisher.com... does anyone have an opinion about the quality of

their work, or can you suggest a superior alternative?

 

cheers,

danee

[beno_t_marchal]

<p>My publisher is the company which produces the books for Apple. You should get the

same print quality but presumably not the Apple templates.

<p>--ben<br><a href="http://www.marchal.com/">marchal.com</a>

[john kissane]

I have used them in the past and would do it again. Can be expensive for loads of pages but in the long run I was very happy.

 

Spend the time with the layout and setup of the pics and captions (if you want them)on the individual pages. Good luck, give it a try.

 

regards john k

[william_john_smith]

For something much better and not that much more go to: http://

www.fastbackbooks.com/

[daneev]

thanks all for the imput....

did you print at fastback? how is their color reproduction? covers?

 

d

[Brad_]

There are some issues with Fastback - I looked at them closely. First off is there are not

many hard cover size choices. Second, there are few papers on their recommended list

that work well with their binding method. Coated papers don't work well. This is important

as their tape-bind system relies on the glue-strip to grab well into the fibers of the paper.

They're experimenting with a device called the abrader which essentially fillets the edge of

the paper so that the glue can grab hold of the internal fibers. That said, if you go with a

recommended paper their binding strength is amazing. I saw a demo where a several

hundred page book was yanked up and down from a single page - it didn't come out.

 

You can either give them a stack of pages or they'll print on their paper using a

xerographic process from files. They can bind either in hard cover or in soft. Both use

what is essentially a tape bind system. Note that traditional hardcover books are

assembled with stitched signatures of pages and is really a much nicer binding.

 

You can also print you're own book and consider other binding options.

 

The only problem with mypublisher/Apple is they can't print double sided.

 

Whatever you do, be sure and pay attention to the grain of your paper. All paper has a

natural grain and it must run parallel to the spine. If you bind perpendicular to the grain,

you'll find the book difficult to thumb through.

[qtluong]

I got an Apple book for my mom, and while I thought the quality of the binding was good, I was disappointed by that of the printing. They used a fairly low resolution, as well as a workflow that is not color-managed. I would recommend instead to print on inkjet photo-quality the pages and have someone bound them like what Michael of Luminous Landscape did for his "monograph". <a href = "http://terragalleria.com/">Terra Galleria photography</a>.