Details

WE MANUFACTURE BOOKS OF ALL TYPES. Soft cover, hard cover, black and white text, 2 color text, and full color text. We work with files of virtually any type, paper originals, or existing books that require scanning. We do prepress processing and proofing on all books we manufacture.

WE GO BEYOND BOOK PRINTING FOR YOU. We want to make it easy for you to have your books printed. To do this we have conquered all of the supporting areas that customers have asked us about over the years.

WE SUPPORT YOUR DECISION-MAKING. When you are looking at long lists of printers, all flashing their lights and waving their arms, how do you decide who to use. The first-impression quote price can be very misleading; the final price may be a lot higher. The quality of your books may not be what you expect. The whole experience of dealing with the printing company may be lengthy and unpleasant. A little care at the beginning can save money, assure top quality, and make the whole experience pleasant for you.

COMPETITIVE EDGE. We excel in certain ways, described here.

FILE UPLOADS and DOWNLOADS. We use WeTransfer for file uploads. When you're ready to upload your files, let us know and we'll e-mail a secure link that you can use for your upload. This link is unique to you, and is not shared. So your files are completely protected from prying eyes and hands.

We also use WeTransfer to send out any PDF proofs that are needed.

MEET YOUR SCHEDULE NEEDS. Our normal turn-around time for perfect bound books is 3 weeks, and for saddle-stitched books 2 weeks (plus whatever amount of time you want to review your proofs). For domestically produced Smythe sewn books or full color books, the turnaround is normally 4-5 weeks.

For books printed in Hong Kong, the turnaround is normally 4 weeks (plus 4 weeks transit time). If you have a pressing schedule requirement, the prices may be so attractive that you can afford for us to air freight a "starter kit" of books, and have them in your hands within a 4 week turnaround. With normal economical ocean shipping, the transit time to your door is close to 4 weeks. We have an excellent record of meeting schedule commitments. We take pride in our excellent service, competitive prices, top quality, and aggressive scheduling.

If you have a critical schedule need, such as a book signing or conference, please discuss your schedule with us. We will develop a specific schedule based on your files-in date, proof review turnaround, production time, and shipping time, and ink this into our production schedules. Please do not base scheduling for a critical event on the general guidelines given above. The loading in the plant, time to obtain special paper, holiday and vacation times, and other unknowns may affect the actual schedule. The only way to be sure is for us to develop a specific schedule for you. And then, I suggest you allow some buffer time for things to go wrong (snow storms, floods, transportation delays, etc.)

RUN LENGTH. We do not normally quote for fewer than 500 copies of black and white soft cover books or fewer than 300 copies of hard cover books or books that are mostly in color. We can produce any quantity above that which you want. At the low end, it's all a matter of economics. As you can see from the chart below, the unit cost -- the cost per copy -- starts high and drops as the quantity of books increases.

This chart compares the cost per book for various order quantities of perfect bound black and white books. For example, if you order 2000 books, then each book costs only half (53%) as much as if you order 500 books. This is an example, not a universal formula.

A NOTE ON PRACTICAL QUANTITIES. Not all combinations of specifications and quantity will yield a price that is practical for you. For example, if you are interested in buying 300 copies of an 8.5 x 11 full color book with 400 pages, the unit cost will be very high. There may be a special circumstance in which such a high cost is worth it for you -- for example, for a special company consulting report. In most cases it just won't work for general books you expect to sell. When we see such a circumstance, we will respond to your quote request with a note about the high cost and information about reducing the unit cost with larger quantities.

Want to Print Out Pages from this web site? If the image runs off the edge of your sheet, set your printer to print Landscape. Then it'll fit.

Spam. We have found a solution to spam that works great for us: www.spamstopshere.com It works this way: Your e-mail traffic is routed through the servers at spamstopshere, where it is tested against criteria that you can customize. The most important filter eliminates e-mail with links to known IP addresses or phone numbers for spammers. I don't use any of the formulas that might stop e-mail that I want to be sure to receive. I don't know of any e-mail that I've lost by accident, and my spam-in rate is very low.

This spam filtering approach avoids the inconvenience that some solutions impose on your correspondents.

Anti-Virus. We have also found a solution to viruses that works great for us: NOD32 from Eset software. It does not seem to slow anything down. It was easy to set up. It has a great record for catching viruses. You can get more information at www.eset.com. (I haven't put a link here because their web site won't let you return to here when you've finished looking through their site.)

What's a Page? Unfortunately the term "page" is used in common conversation to mean two different things: a page or a leaf. We count pages as the page numbers normally run. Each leaf in the book has two pages, one on each side; in fact, each leaf has two pages even if one of them is blank. There are twice as many pages as there are leaves. If the pages in a book are numbered from 1 to 250, then there are 250 pages in the book and 125 leaves. It's really confusing to us when you ask for a quote with a page description of "320 pages printed on both sides". To me that means 320 pages (160 leaves) and they are not blank on the back. If you mean 640 pages when you say this, we won't get your quote right for you.

Bleeds, Safe Zone, Spreads, Spines. For information about manufacturing tolerances and their effect visit here.

Image Issues, Screen Values for Good Printing. Visit here.

CMYK vs RGB colors, and color conversion. Visit here.

Color Match Proofs and Matching Colors. Visit here.

For file submission standards, visit here.