Print on demand

[flyingwombat]

A few years back there was talk about POD being added to W23. Is this a dead subject?

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by flyingwombat

A few years back there was talk about POD being added to W23. Is this a dead subject?

It seems so. The Report to the Stakeholders for 2012 says:

Originally Posted by Steve Jackson

We're still not doing Print On Demand. In early 2013, we gave up on it for now and repurposed the "POD room" for offices.

[robkelk]

(insert your favourite "room full of POD people" joke here)

Why not simply buy a copy of the PDF and take it to your local print-on-demand shop? You'll have the data right away, and you'll have the printed book sooner than you would if SJGames was to ship it to you.

[flyingwombat]

Originally Posted by robkelk

(insert your favourite "room full of POD people" joke here)

Why not simply buy a copy of the PDF and take it to your local print-on-demand shop? You'll have the data right away, and you'll have the printed book sooner than you would if SJGames was to ship it to you.

Done it once using Lulu. I could not get the cover right. One day I might try it again.

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by flyingwombat

Done it once using Lulu. I could not get the cover right. One day I might try it again.

I've done four different books on Lulu. The first one I used their cover design and disliked the results. Despite that I used it on two out the three books I printed in the second batch; but for the last book I used the "Upload a picture" option and that turned out *MUCH* better. For that you need only be a little handy with Photoshop, Gimp, Paint.net, or a similar program. They give you the exact dimensions in pixels of the front and back side as well as the exact placement of the spine. You just need to block out in an image editor then fill in the different sections of the image. The biggest problem is trying to judge the gutter around the edges (they don't really give you a good idea of where the fold around the edges or the fold between the spine and the cover will be), but giving a wide birth around the edges seems to do the trick pretty well.

[PiperHolmes]

Hello. Sorry for the necro, but have a question about PoDing owned GURPS PDFs with Lulu.

My understanding is that Lulu effectively owns the rights to anything posted. From playing with their site, it seems you can post a book, and create it as a "private use project" only. But according to their T&C, it's always possible that that book can 'go out into the wild' after publishing. And we have permission from sjgames (If I'm reading this correctly) to print one copy for personal use.

It seems like best practises would be uploading the PDF in question, purchasing one copy, and then deleting the project after. Is this an accurate assessment? Thanks

[ericbsmith]

Lulu is pretty clear in the T&C about what rights you retain (ownership of the material) and what rights they gain (a sub-license to use it in connection with their website). Essentially, they are saying they may post samples or use cover mock-ups in their advertising. And they also state that if you set the project to private they'll attempt to keep it private, but cannot guarantee security of the project - in other words, if they get hacked you're out of luck and cannot seek recourse against them. So I honestly wouldn't worry about any of that, just make sure to set the project to private so you aren't selling printed versions of SJGames books.

As for "best practice" you certainly could delete the project after you've ordered it, but I don't think it's absolutely necessary. I had several projects I mocked up and left there for a while before I ordered them. If you're worried about it then go ahead and delete them, but I'd wait until after you received your order in case there's a problem and you need to do a reprint or something.

[PiperHolmes]

Great, thanks Eric! I'm going to go give it a shot...

[ericbsmith]

If you have not ordered yet I just got an e-mail with a promo code for Lulu. 15% off is you use code LULU15 expires Aug 7.
As an aside, Lulu almost always has an active coupon code. They used to offer some pretty steep discounts, now it's usually more like 15-20% off or free shipping. Still worth looking for before ordering.