Discussion of POD Tech

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by beetle496

That makes sense. How new are the Amazon POD offerings? It is new to me, but SJG has been talking bout POD (in generalities) for years. I have the impression that the first Amazon POD offerings were a year or two ago. But maybe I am imagining that?
Fingers crossed.

The first snapshot of the Print on Demand page at Archive.org is March 2017, and at that time there were six books available. From that I was able to find this Daily Illumninator announcement of the second batch of three Out-of-Print books being made available, with the first three being made available at the end of November 2016 (announced in a post by Phil Reed).

So it's been around three years now. The initial emphasis was in getting many of the core 4th Edition books back in print (for obvious reasons, to support the current line). After that they began bringing back some of the more popular 3rd Edition books.

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by ericbsmith

Honestly, I think it's more a matter that they have not adjusted their production process to put the new PDFs into the POD stream during production; as I noted they have not released any of their PDF-only products as Amazon POD (they released a few earlier PDFs as "POD," but what they called "POD" was really limited print runs, not true POD like Amazon).

I agree, they probably ought to make that change, but they haven't.

for what it's worth, my experience with dealing with prepping files for Amazon POD was very painful. I had a title (Dungeon Grappling) for which I had a proper PDF/X-1a output and sitting on my desk were 50 POD copies from Publisher's Graphics for that file. So I KNEW it worked, and I KNEW it produced proper output.

It took me over a dozen revisions - some of them major - to get through Amazon's automated screening process for the file. All the while they were telling me if I had any questions, I could certainly pay them, by the hour, for consulting to fix it.

And when push came to shove, the first time I got a retail order . . . they were misprinted. Yah, customer was REAL pleased.

Anyway, perhaps things are better now . . .but I found it onerous in the extreme. SJG has more experienced layout folks than me, so they may have fewer challenges . . . but for me, they were enough to make me stop using Amazon entirely.

[robertsconley]

My experience with different PoD mirrors Doug as well. Onebookshelf book printing has an approval phase and then you order the proof. The feedback loop is slow so when problem occurs you spend more time making sure everything thing is still right. The approval process, Lightning Source, is problematic at times.

The upshot of it that it take labor beyond just ensuring you have the right bleed, color space, and PDF format.