Desktop publishing

[bryankendall]

I am writing a book with many color images. I hope to print on both sides of the paper. It will be 200 pages. I want to print 100 copies minimum.

I want to try to print it myself. I have some questions:

#1 Inkjet or laserjet ?

#2 What models of printer are capable of that sort of volume?
What model printer will give a good resolution of the color photos?
What model printer can I buy external ink reservoirs for.......instead of buying expensive ink cartridges.

All things considered, would it be less expensive to have a commercial print shop do it?

Thank you

bryan kendall

[edDV]

Are you going to write another book every week?

Can you afford the learning curve?

If not I would take the file to Kinkos.

[lgh529]

I hope you want to spend a boatload of money to do this. If your book has photo's, then you don't want a color LaserJet, you'll have to do inkjet. Color LaserJet is really good for graphics like line art, bar graphs, etc. But they don't do so good at photos.

100 copies x 200 pages = 20,000 prints. At $.15 (USD) per page, thats gonna set you back about $3,000 in ink alone.

And your time is going to be worse. Not counting the time it takes to load paper and change ink cartridges, your looking at 24 hours of printing time for good quality prints for an inkjet. Even the high capacity printers aren't going to hold 20 reams of paper. In terms of real life, it would take a person working full time at least a week to do it.

I wouldn't even send it to Kinko's because they are going to charge you the same thing, plus labor and markup. Find some print house that does small run printings.

I don't want to discourage you from writing your book, but sometimes it's better to let the professionals do the job than try and do it yourself.

[Nelson37]

Inkjet is quite simply out of the question for quantity printing. Not to mention the smearing if it gets wet, or the lesser print quality.

I find color laserjet photos clearly superior to inkjet printed photos.

This would depend on the quantity of color images, but I would print all black-and-white text on a standard laser printer, and use a color laser to do only what you pay extra for, the color photos.

You will want to use a good quality, heavy paper.

Hard to justify the expense for just the one project, though I have no idea what a professional printer would charge for this. You will also need binding and book covers, though I have seen some systems for doing this yourself.

Cost per page for laser text closer to .02 cents per page. Color laser costs higher, but still less than .15. The better HP lasers commonly have print lifetimes of several million pages.

A duplexing printer will save time, but severely limit selection and complicate the mechanicals, I'm not a fan of duplexer units. Flipping the pages is not that hard.

[dLee]

You said you wanted to do it yourself, but in terms of time and money, it's too expensive - as other posters have mentioned.

I've done a few of these in the past. Anything other than comb binding (which I dislike) is a problem.

Shutterbug (a photo magazine) recently featured an article / review that might interest you:

http://www.shutterbug.net/web_profiles/0508web/index.html

blurb.com

7x7 40 pages = $12.95 8x10 40 pages = $19.95 Discounts for purchasing more than 10 copies. Extra pages are nominal.

Here's another related article:

http://www.shutterbug.net/techniques/pro_techniques/0607become/index.html

[lordsmurf]

I work with things like this on a near-daily basis.

Laserjet color is far superior to inkjet quality, for book publications on regular paper. Photographs look wonderful. The only way to make a photo look "better" is to use a special inkjet printer (one made for photos, in the $500+ price range -- or simply outsource to a silver halide print). But that's out of the question, as this is a book.

One thing to avoid is cheap paper, opt for 24lb or higher. You can do it yourself, no problem. Buy a KONICA-MINOLTA laser, you do not want an HP (they simply cannot get their colors to match worth a damn). Minolta printers can run as low as a few hundred to a few thousand, depending on model. I have both a low-end and a high-end machine, and each looks the same in output quality. Toner carts run anywhere from $100-225, depending on printer model.

You can easily print several books worth.

But I would only do this for a small run of books, or a one-by-one order process. Binding has various options and associated costs too. Sometimes you can get a local college or high school (if they have such programs+facilities) to bind books for you, for a nominal cost. And I mean better hardback binding too!

Using a printer for a 100-copy run would be my suggestion. It's going to cost the same or more as doing it yourself. At least if you do it yourself, you'll have the printer for other needs, and can print shorter runs if you want.

No matter how you approach this, it's going to cost several thousand dollars.

[David_PA]

Not sure if this is too late to be of assistance.

Did a similar project last summer: 220 page book, 100 copies. Used the Konica Minolta 5550. It was a math text with 100s of colored graphs and marginal color-coded text boxes on most pages. Not as much color ink use as you'd have with photos and perhaps not quite as much text either because of all the math formulas, which don't traverse the entire line.

Cost: printer $600, 24-lb paper $300, extra cartridges 2x B&W plus 1x colors $700. Spiral binding $900. Total = $2500. Sold the books for about $40.

To have it printed would have cost about $38 per book including binding. So, in my case, there was a savings that allowed me to offer the book at about $15 less to the store, $20 after retail markup. Also, having it professionally printed at a reasonable cost required sending it out, with a proof copy only coming back if I agreed to pay for the job with them. This wasn't an acceptable arrangement for me. Going to a local printer, the cost per book was about $70, including (spiral) binding. (Add more for other binding.)

With your heavier ink coverage, you'd probably need to add another $500 for a second replacement color cartridge set, which would raise your costs without binding form $1600 to $2100, or $5 per book. But, still only $21 per book plus binding.

It takes a while to print 100 copies. Ten to fifteen per day is about all you can do, because while each copy prints in under 10 minutes, you need to wait about 15 minutes between prints or the fuser gets too hot and color quality greatly deteriorates, and you've got paper loading time and the time it takes to straighten out the finished set, which isn't stacked cleanly in the output tray. So, figure about 2 per hour. Also, gotta turn the AC down low if you're doing it in the summer.

Still - with all of this - if you don't mind the hard work - you can definitely save money doing it yourself.