Book People Archive

Re: Offtopic - Printing Digital Texts

On Wed, 13 Jun 2001, Jonathan Bartlett <johnnyb@[redacted]> wrote:
> I was wondering if anyone knew of any small-run presses, where you can
> send them a Postscript file and they would make a batch of books
> (<1000). This would be really useful for printing e-texts for classes and
> such. Does anyone have a list of small-run presses like that?

I found myself asking much the same question a couple years ago. There was a
dearth of short-run listings online and the closest Xerox Docutech was in
Austin or Dallas (from Shreveport). Plus the print houses just didn't seem to
understand short run publishing. They always tried to push a large print run
for a lower per-unit price, even though the Docutech is designed to eliminate
that offset-based practice.

So I developed my own short-run process that didn't require the ridiculously
huge expense of a docutech (The books are bound by hand!) and joined with J&F
Publishing, forming the Short Order Press to offer short-run book printing.
Since then we have been doing mostly family-history books, usually selling
about twenty or thirty copies of any particular book; and we are bringing
back a few long-out-of-print cult-interest mysteries (Harry Stephen Keeler's
works). You can get the details on our custom-printing at
http://members.aol.com/bookvendor/custom.html

Your cost per book from the Short Order Press runs around fifteen or twenty
dollars, more or less.

Not to blow our own horn TOO loud, last week I visited a large print shop in
Fargo ND and asked for a bid on printing, on demand, ONE copy at a time of a
little genealogy book, Traill West. Each run-of-one on their Docutech would
cost me a whopping $77.00! They gave me bids on five-ten-twenty- and
fifty-at-once, too. The per-unit price on fifty books was much better. Under
$12.00, a few dollars less than what you'd pay at Short Order Press for a
similar run. No surprise there-- Mechanical processes are always cheaper than
hand-crafting in a long, mass-production run.

Jim Weiler
The Naked Word
Editor-in-Chief, Short Order Press