My Perfect-Bound Book from CafePress Finally Arrives
On Monday 8th December 2003 I ordered a perfect-bound book from CafePress. Exactly 3 weeks later I received in the mail my first ever print-on-demand book, Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, with layout and cover design by yours truly. As promised in this blog entry , here are my first impressions...
The first
thing to look at is of course the cover. The color seems pretty much
as I wanted. If you look real close you can see the print screen, but it
appears no more coarse than other color paperbacks I have lying around. I
deliberately made wishy washy dirty colors to see how well subtle
gradations came out [as well as can be expected]
You may be able to just see the black spine peeking around the edge on the left. I would say that the spine is no more than a millimeter out of place here. This is something I was worried about, but that seems like pretty good alignment.
Close analysis of the fonts (with a loupe) reveals a bit of scruffiness, but that is totally my own fault, since I uploaded as JPG to save time (PNG is recommended), and Jpeg images are not great for line art and sharp fonts.
Note that
the cover is coated with a glossy laminate, which is a bit of a shame,
since it looks a little tacky compared to that very nice matte
cello-glazing used by a lot of the [more expensive] paperbacks these days.
Still, this is hardly unusual, as a lot of retail books
have glossy laminated covers too.
Here we see
the only printing alteration I have found so far, this small
serial number printed on the back. CafePress don't actually mention this
on their site (as far as I can see) which is a shame because it would be
nice to know in advance where it will end up on your painstakingly
hand-crafted cover design.
Opening the
book, I am pleased to see that no extra pages are added at the beginning.
No blanks, no CafePress boilerplate no nothing. Excellent!
You get full control over pages from the very beginning.
The cruddy bitmap seen here seems to be screened fairly coarsely... I think the best looking in-book images would be acheived using line art (eg output from Illustrator), but this is to be expected.
Unfortunately when laying out the thing I hadn't quite sussed how to change page numbering between sections, so even these front pages have numbers at the bottom. Yuk!
And look,
all the words are there! Registration seems pretty good from page to page
(flip though rapidly and the margins seem consistent)
The paper quality seems pretty good, perhaps a tad thin, but not too transparent and with a finer grain than a lot of paperbacks. Actual print quality is superior to an average book I think, probably at least equivalent to 600DPI laser printer.
In hindsight I think maybe I should have added a little more space for the inside margin.
The only
shonky aspect I could find is that the spine is a little dodgy near the
top and bottom. About an inch at each end is kind of wrinkled and does not
make proper contact with the inner glued spine.
*
Looking at this now, I think it's a shame I didn't add more useful images into the text and cover, in order to determine what the printable area of the pages were, get an effective gamma value for midtones etc. Ah well.
To sum up, it seems like a pretty good deal, especially if you want to print off 15 or more copies, whereupon the price plummets to $4 per book (last time I checked anyway)