I was wondering if anyone has experience with online book publishing, either for portfolio use or selling books? I was thinking it might be quite fun to have a go at this, however I wonder about print quality.
Winnie, I have used http://www.mypublisher.com with good success. Although I have not done any in quite sometime now. I would say, with any publisher, always print one copy first before bulk orders.
Hi Winnie; I printed two books 8 1/2 x 11 hard cover from iPhoto and quality of the final product was very good. I was quite surprised and would definitely use them again. Cost works out to be about $1 per page which is not the cheapest around but considering this is less expensive than printing images at home it's OK. Further, the books look very professional and I have received nothing but good compliments. I hear that mypublisher is also good along with blurb.com and another one that I can't remember right now. The iPhoto book took 1 day to create and was at the door five days after uploading. The file stays active so if you want to print one book at a time and personalize it the cost is the same, just a premium to ship one book at a time. Apoerture creates a similar book with more flexibility than iPhoto. Blurb.com provides a program for free that you use to create a book (if you're on PC) and there are many, many more options than with iPhoto and Aperture. I started with iPhoto as I just wanted a picture book, no frills and that's what I got but in very good quality. Have fun, you will be amazed at what gets delivered to the house, especially considering that a few years ago this was virtually impossible. Steve
I've used the book-ordering built into Apple's Aperture before, but just for gifts. The quality is fine, but they are halftone printed, so I think they are not going to be as good as a true photo book...I believe most high-quality photo books are printed using some other means. I could be wrong, but I would guess that sites like mypublisher.com also use halftone printing.
I think I used snapfish.com once before owning Aperture, and the results were similar, although maybe marginally less color accurate (not significantly so).
Since there's no setup cost with any of these services, you might as well try one and see what you think.
As far as I know, the publishers that might produce higher quality have setup costs and require ordering hundreds of books. I think Michael Reichmann had an article about this sometime in the last few years.
I'd be really interested to know if there are any publishers that do something other than half-toning and don't charge setup costs or require bulk orders. I think it takes printing plates or something, so this seems unlikely...
I was quite pleased with the photo book I built and printed from www.mpix.com
Certainly nice quality as a gift / basic portfolio, I'll leave others to be the judge on whether it really stands up quality wise to other options, I certainly thought it looked very professional.
I'm about to order one from MPix within the next few days. I've layed out the pages, and just want to proofread some of the captions before submitting it. I use their regular print services, and find them to have exceptional quality. Their software was very simple to use. What impressed me most was how fast it was. There's virtually no lag time to load images, add them to pages, move pages around, etc. I'll report back when I get the book.
The most popular self-publishing publishers are LuLu and My Publisher. Probably the highest quality is Pitko in Canada. LuLu does a good job and can handle everything from layout and barcodes to distribution. Pitko is top end, great for limited edition, fine art books, but too expensive for the retail market (bookstores).
I too have used Blurb, I would say the results are as 'good' as most average photo books put out there by publishers (looks like a 'real' book in terms of quality, but the reults are not high end if you want a book to match your photos exactly. Darwin
I too have used Blurb, I would say the results are as 'good' as most average photo books put out there by publishers (looks like a 'real' book in terms of quality, but the reults are not high end if you want a book to match your photos exactly. Darwin
Thanks for the further input! Some of them require US/Canadian address for payment reasons, so that counts me out. Blurb have changed their rules about this, so I might look at this. If anyone is looking into this too.. the pages refer to sides of pages rather than pages in your hand (just in case you were confused like me)
Discussion
11 repliesI think I used snapfish.com once before owning Aperture, and the results were similar, although maybe marginally less color accurate (not significantly so).
Since there's no setup cost with any of these services, you might as well try one and see what you think.
As far as I know, the publishers that might produce higher quality have setup costs and require ordering hundreds of books. I think Michael Reichmann had an article about this sometime in the last few years.
I'd be really interested to know if there are any publishers that do something other than half-toning and don't charge setup costs or require bulk orders. I think it takes printing plates or something, so this seems unlikely...
Certainly nice quality as a gift / basic portfolio, I'll leave others to be the judge on whether it really stands up quality wise to other options, I certainly thought it looked very professional.
-- Bass
Good Luck.