Can you offer any suggestions? Self publishers, etc?

Thank you.

Gloria

i have done over 10 there and i’ve heard nothing but positivity back.

hope this helps.

Carty.

I’ve been assembling my new commercial portfolio for 2009. My old book was about 2 yrs old, and I’ve been apprehensive to send it out, causing me to lose business. Not good. Starting a new portfolio from scratch is a tough project. It t…

If it’s for your personal use, fair enough. But in terms of showing a photo editor – at least from my own perspective – we all know Blurb and the like, and can look past some of the inconsistent quality of the reproductions. However, the content has to be there and, often times, a horrible design sense and bad sequencing can influence my ability to really see the work and understand the project, especially since I usually have limited time to look at it.

All three do exceptional jobs. More expensive than Blurb, Lulu. MyPublisher, iPhoto and Asuka, but this is because they cater to professionals who care about the end product. As other have mentioned, you get what you pay for.

I have done both POD (Print On Demand) and custom bound books for promotion. The deciding factors to consider are obvious. Time, money and your target audience. If you want to make keepsakes to send to friends and colleagues for the Holidays, go with POD. If you want to make a promotional piece that will make a difference, go with a limited run printer. And if you really want to stand out, and have a limited number of people you want to impress, go with a self-bound, home-printed book. In fact you can even sell these as limited edition books and make good money. Raymond Meeks is a photographer who does this.

Some helpful sites -

Blurb – http://www.blurb.com/
BlurbNation – http://www.blurb.com/blurb_nation
Blurberati – http://blog.blurb.com/

Lulu – http://www.lulu.com/

Asuka – http://asukabook.com/

Paperchase – http://www.paperchase.net/

CastlePress – http://www.castlepress.com/

A&I – http://www.aandi.com/

I can think of a dozen reasons why you might want to make a quick and inexpensive book, even if the ‘quality’ isn’t optimum. Maybe you just want to see how your sequence works in book form, or maybe you just want to catalog and organize your work from the past year. Or maybe just because you’ve always wanted to make a photobook and now you can. Perhaps I’m seeing the option to make these books more as a tool that can greatly aid the process of making a body of work rather than as a final destination for a finished project, but either way, from my point of view the glass is definitely half full.

Needless to say, if you’re happy with what you get that’s fine. And I didn’t even necessarily want to start arguments about the actual quality of the books so much – what I was mostly after was to point out that *if* you want to get a good book you’ll have to be prepared to spend *way* more work on in than expected.

I prefer using Lulu.com for a few simple reasons. The cost of making a soft back Lulu book is at least 1/2 the cost of making a Blurb book. ($18.93 for a 96 page soft back book on Lulu costs $37.95 on Blurb.) This makes it less painful when you order multiple copies so you can work out the edit, design, and make color adjustments. It’s also possible to make very short and inexpensive books that cost around $10 which is not an option with Blurb or MyPublisher. Some of the other reasons I prefer Lulu is that they offer wider range of soft back book sizes, and you can use InDesign for your layout so there is no fussing around with new software. Last but not least, there is no logo automatically placed inside your book, and no additional $10 fee for removing that logo!

Even if you have to make multiple proofs and adjustments, it’s still enormously cheaper and easier to make a book using print-on-demand than any other process today. I think this alone is well worth being excited about. Unfortunately, it is still complicated and involving process since just because its ‘digital’ doesn’t mean it’s going to be automatic. But it still is much easier, and five years ago it simply wasn’t an option at all.

Comparing a print-on-demand book with a Steidl book is, naturally, absurd. But those of us who don’t want to wait for Steidl to publish our books can get started conceptualizing and making mock-ups of our books right now, which is extremely empowering and inspiring if you asked me.

And luckily, what makes a good photobook is not wholly determined by print quality. Just like in music, there are countless examples of work made with high-production values that ends up being horribly uninspiring, and just as many examples of lo-fi work that absolutely resonates with you. A strong group of images edited and designed well can still shine in print-on-demand format too.

I used these for my commercial books, and at the time of printing, thought I’d devise some workable way to slide in a separate update of sorts, into the books, with new work. If the book was 10″x10″, I’d make up something on the Epson that was also 10″x10″. But I found that it’s just clunky.

I”m heading back to the old Brewer book, with the vinyl pages. I also wondered if the whole “printed book” thing came off as too fine-art feeling; not commercial enough.

The results have been fantastic, and feedback from art directors and designers have been great.

Yeah, I was trying to make that point a little as well. It’s like looking at images on a monitor. We all have pictures on the internet now, but an old crt monitor with a horrible shift will display it far from our perfected systems. However, the person used to that monitor can still tell that it’s a good picture compared to what they’re used to seeing. There’s a lot less control over the final product in the digital age.

@TP: Well, it depends what book publishers you take. I’m not sure I’d compare teNeues or Taschen with, for example, Steidl…

I’ve only ordered the proof for myself though so I can’t say for sure if there is consistency in their print quality but another photographer told me that she ordered my magazine and said it looked good so that sort of verifies the quality for me.

http://magcloud.com/browse/Issue/2852

Besides, I’m not even sure traditional book printers have that much of an advantage in quality for photo books. In my less than a year old copy of Bruce Weber’s “Blood Sweat And Tears” by teNeues, the binding has come apart from the spine and the print quality is *okay* at best.

One other thing to remember: the brain has this weird capacity to make things OK. You know how you obsess and obsess about pulling those five points of Cyan out of a certain area in an image? Well, just remember that the people receiving these books have only seen this ONE version of the image — that is the Normal for them — they don’t have anything else to compare it to in their minds. So to them, your clients, the image is probably perfectly fine.

And even on images that you have seen before, say, Andrew’s cow image, when the image is that strong, you’re looking at the image, and not obsessing about the color accuracy. Again, the brain just makes it OK.

Best thing to do with any of these companies is: get their ICC profile, look at your images in Softproof, and then send it off. Throw some salt over your shoulder for good luck, and you’ll be just fine. And remember, that client on the receiving end is going to spend about 4.2 seconds looking at that image, and they’re going to see about ten thousand more images that same day, so just exhale and know that. If the image is strong, their brains will take care of the rest.

Then I am going to have a set of Epson prints that I make myself on Hahnemuhle paper bound by Paper Dragon:

http://www.paperdragonbooks.com/