print-on-demand publishers

[hotmetal]

Anyone have a good recommendation for a competent print-on-demand book printer? I just had an annoying and slightly costly experience with a place in Tennessee printing a personal book project for me. They did two 100 copy runs, the second one actually looked right, but I had to pay for both. They were complete idiots, and smarmy ones at that, to work with. (PM me and I'll tell you who they are.)

[gnubler]

It's always interesting being a print customer and dealing with another printer.

Tennessee? Complete idiots? Obviously Tap wasn't involved in that mess.

[tapdn]

It's always interesting being a print customer and dealing with another printer.

Tennessee? Complete idiots? Obviously Tap wasn't involved in that mess.

did you forget the  emo?

[gnubler]

It was supposed to be a compliment. Must have come out botched like everything else I say.

[tapdn]

 :laugh:
...no, I did actually take it as a compliment. At least when I was there. Not sure (or care) what they are like now. :rolleyes:

[hotmetal]

I learned some more about part of what just happened via a thread on print-on-demand over at Macintouch the other day. The "preflight" software for the digital device immediately converts everything to sRGB before spitting out a preflight report. This explains why they held me up for a week arguing that my greyscale images were rgb and that my job needed to be charged as 4C. They were, obviously, greyscale when they left my hardrive for their trip over the interweb to their automated order processing server.

They then wanted to charge me to "convert" my images back to greyscale. Lessee... first they screw up your images, then they make you pay them to "fix" them. I refused to pay them, instead I called the front desk and asked for someone in the pressroom. That guy knew enough to look at my original file in Acrobat, and he took my job off hold without charging me to "fix" anything. But the trims were wrong and the cover color didn't match the $50 proof they sent my client. And so on and so forth. Not enough money involved to bother filing in small claims court. I just deleted my account and walked off into the sunset...

Next project, I'll go over to BookMobile in St. Paul. They charge about 1/3 more, but I can drive over and talk to them if I need to. Yeah, I know. I made a mistake when I let my client chose printers based on lowest cost...

[frailer]

I learned some more about part of what just happened via a thread on print-on-demand over at Macintouch the other day. The "preflight" software for the digital device immediately converts everything to sRGB before spitting out a preflight report. This explains why they held me up for a week arguing that my greyscale images were rgb and that my job needed to be charged as 4C. They were, obviously, greyscale when they left my hardrive for their trip over the interweb to their automated order processing server.

They then wanted to charge me to "convert" my images back to greyscale. Lessee... first they screw up your images, then they make you pay them to "fix" them. I refused to pay them, instead I called the front desk and asked for someone in the pressroom. That guy knew enough to look at my original file in Acrobat, and he took my job off hold without charging me to "fix" anything. But the trims were wrong and the cover color didn't match the $50 proof they sent my client. And so on and so forth. Not enough money involved to bother filing in small claims court. I just deleted my account and walked off into the sunset...

Next project, I'll go over to BookMobile in St. Paul. They charge about 1/3 more, but I can drive over and talk to them if I need to. Yeah, I know. I made a mistake when I let my client chose printers based on lowest cost...

I truly enjoyed that bedtime morality tale. It's got everything.   :laugh:

[gnubler]

With that story one can see why the average tool might become angry with a printer, getting the runaround. "But my last printer didn't have any problems with my files..."