Discussion of POD Tech
 

The GURPS POD titles that I am interested in buying are 4e Steampunk 1, 2, and 3.

I cannot figure it out! Please help.

Re: GURPS On Demand
 

Sadly, none of those appear to be POD yet. See the list here...
It takes time and money to set things up so its typically done a book or two at a time.

Re: GURPS On Demand
 

In addition, SJGames has yet to make any of their PDF only products available as PoD; the products they have made available were all originally released as printed books. This is likely because creating a PoD of PDF only products would require an extra step: creating a cover, which includes layout time and possibly licencing artwork, both of which are non-trivial additional costs costs.

So it seems unlikely that the Steampunk PDF releases will be made available in PoD anytime soon. This means your best bet would be to use a service like Lulu or your local copy shop to have the PDFs printed in book form.

Re: GURPS On Demand
 

The output required for printing is usually double or so the resolution as for PDF (my PDFs are 144 to 150dpi; printing requires 300dpi for photos and 1200 for black/white line-art). If the original layout files are in hand - and they may not be - and all the original art meets spec, it does require separate cover files as you say.

If the art is the wrong resolution, or if there's no simple way to include a "bleed" zone on the existing layout, or any number of things, it gets messy quick.

Re: Discussion of POD Tech
 

Thanks Eric for pointing me to this discussion.

It just seems very peculiar to me that SJG would not incorporate Amazon POD requirements for new releases. OTOH, it probably maximizes profits to have PDF as the only choice for a year or two, then once sales levels off, turn on the Amazon POD option.

Re: Discussion of POD Tech
 

I don't think it's a matter of "giving it a year or two" but instead a matter of resource management. There's one or two people at SJGames that prepare all of the PDFs and PoDs that SJGames releases. There is limited time and limited budget for these projects. Do they bring back books that have been out of print for 15-20 years or set up newer PDFs to be PoDs? To they spend their art budget on new PDFs or on setting up covers for older PDFs?

Right now it seems that they are choosing to get older books back in print on PoD. I would love to see them at least try to get some newer PDFs on PoD, if only to act as a viability test. Some likely candidates for this are the various series of PDFs: Action, After the End, Monster Hunters, Steampunk, and Power-Ups. They could do the Dungeon Fantasy series, as 1-4 already have covers and had a limited print run, but the DFRPG kind of steps on them, as does the old print run, so it a different product might be better. Of the others Power-Ups, After the End, or Monster Hunters seem like better choices to me.

Re: Discussion of POD Tech
 

When you are in a hole, stop digging!
Agreed, bringing back out-of-print books is a better use of resources.

My point was that new stuff -- the born digital materials -- should be supporting POD out of the gate. This is obvious enough that my assumption is that the new stuff not being available for POD is strictly a marketing decision.

Re: Discussion of POD Tech
 

Let me suggest an alternative possibility: supporting POD requires sufficient additional work over and above that necessary to publish a work as PDF that there's a cost decision to be made. Making the book in the first place and releasing it costs $X. Preparing it for POD, I very strongly suspect, costs an additional $Y because somebody has to spend the time undertaking the necessary additional tasks. Since POD sales don't appear to be a guaranteed money maker, it makes more sense to wait to see how well the PDF sells before spending that extra money. A book which sells a lot of copies as PDF is more likely to sell a significant number as POD and is therefore worth the added investment. Something which doesn't sell well as PDF is unlikely to sell better as POD and therefore is unlikely to make that additional investment back.

(What are those tasks? No idea. Maybe reformatting, maybe ordering and hand-checking a test copy, maybe wrestling with Amazon's upload systems, maybe doing the ritual dance to appease the spirits of the printer. But I'd put money on the supposition that there are tasks/additional costs, because it's glaringly obvious that if they could offer books as POD at no additional cost to them they're leaving money on the table every time they don't.)

Re: Discussion of POD Tech
 

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.

Re: Discussion of POD Tech
 

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.

Re: Discussion of POD Tech
 

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.

Re: Discussion of POD Tech
 

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.

Re: Discussion of POD Tech
 

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.