Check this out:
T Magazine (New York Times style section) “A Fount of Fonts,” By Steven Heller, July 7, 2010: “A designer’s mecca lies in a font museum located 40 miles north of Venice.”. Thanks to Brian Akers for the link.
Wednesday, July 07, 2010
Sunday, June 20, 2010
796 acres of data
I just bought a new computer (haven’t had a chance to open the box yet, actually). As an accessory, I got a backup disk drive, a device about the size of your average hardcover novel. This drive cost less than $200 and hold 2TB of data. That two terabytes. Two trillion bytes.
So I thought about the first disk drive, the IBM 350, which held five million 7-bit characters and was able to access any record in an average of 800 ms (that’s eight tenths of a second, which is longer than it takes some people to tie their shoes).
The 350, as you can see from the Wikipedia picture, was the size of a side-by-side refrigerator and needed five feet of clear floor space around it. If you were to arrange units in a rectangular grid, I figure each unit would occupy about 65 square feet. It would take 533 IBM 350s to hold 2TB of data, and that means you would need close to thirty-five million square feet of space, about 796 acres of air-conditioned floor space. I suppose you could house them in, say, forty-story buildings, reducing the footprint from 796 acres to about forty acres (buildings need space around them). Then there’s the power requirement. And then there’s the question of how much longer than 800 ms it would take to retrieve the data.
Okay, that’s unfair
Let’s skip ahead to the first IBM disk unit I actually saw, in 1962. That was an IBM 1301. The model 2 stored fifty-six million characters and had slightly faster access times (100 to 800ms). But it had the same footprint as the 350, so now we’re down to seventy-two acres.
And what did that seventy-two acres of data cost?
You could have leased it all (exclusive of the real estate and without accounting for the cost of electricity to run and cool the units) a mere $168,000 a month. Or you could have bought the ball of wax for $8.9 million.
Now let’s talk about how the cost of doing business has risen.
So I thought about the first disk drive, the IBM 350, which held five million 7-bit characters and was able to access any record in an average of 800 ms (that’s eight tenths of a second, which is longer than it takes some people to tie their shoes).
The 350, as you can see from the Wikipedia picture, was the size of a side-by-side refrigerator and needed five feet of clear floor space around it. If you were to arrange units in a rectangular grid, I figure each unit would occupy about 65 square feet. It would take 533 IBM 350s to hold 2TB of data, and that means you would need close to thirty-five million square feet of space, about 796 acres of air-conditioned floor space. I suppose you could house them in, say, forty-story buildings, reducing the footprint from 796 acres to about forty acres (buildings need space around them). Then there’s the power requirement. And then there’s the question of how much longer than 800 ms it would take to retrieve the data.
Okay, that’s unfair
Let’s skip ahead to the first IBM disk unit I actually saw, in 1962. That was an IBM 1301. The model 2 stored fifty-six million characters and had slightly faster access times (100 to 800ms). But it had the same footprint as the 350, so now we’re down to seventy-two acres.
And what did that seventy-two acres of data cost?
You could have leased it all (exclusive of the real estate and without accounting for the cost of electricity to run and cool the units) a mere $168,000 a month. Or you could have bought the ball of wax for $8.9 million.
Now let’s talk about how the cost of doing business has risen.
Saturday, June 05, 2010
Print pricing 101
It never ceases to amaze me how many people make it through life with apparent financial success and yet cannot do basic arithmetic. I wonder, sometimes, how they have managed to stay out of jail and out of bankruptcy. And yet there they are. And a lot of the people who so amaze me are salespeople. In particular, they are printing salespeople, because I buy printing services on behalf of my publishing clients.
The basics
For the sake of simplicity, I am discussing only book manufacturing in this post. Book manufacturing consist of printing either digitally or by offset and binding the book with a soft or hard cover. There are further divisions within those categories, but we don’t need to concern ourselves with them for this exercise.
In digital printing, a company may have some administrative costs for setting up a new customer and for uploading and checking files, but these costs are modest and may or may not be itemized on a customer bill. Once the files for a book are loaded onto a server, every copy costs the same amount to produce, from the first to the millionth. The printer may offer some volume discounts as incentives, but the price per copy does not drop rapidly. If you’re going to save money, it will be in ordering quantities that are efficient to ship. The printing and binding costs don’t change much, if at all.
In offset printing, on the other hand, the cost to set up the job is significant, whereas the cost to produce each additional copy of the book is quite low. As more and more of the prepress tasks are automated, the setup costs keep coming down, but they are still important in pricing.
That’s where your trusty calculator comes in
When you get printing quotes, typically you will ask for pricing on two or three different quantities. A given printer may suggest that the lowest quantity might work out better printed digitally and the higher quantities should be printed offset, but you can get all quantities quoted both ways if you want to and if the job could go either way. Some books can only be printed offset, for a variety of reasons.
But now you’re looking at the quotes. You can see that the digital prices don’t change much, if at all, with quantity. That’s as it should be. But then you look at the offset prices and you see this:
The first step is to multiply out the totals:
The difference in cost between 500 copies and 1,000 copies is $450. If we divide $450 by 500, we see that the second 500 copies cost $0.90 each.
The difference in cost between 1,000 copies and 1,500 copies is $1,355. If we divide $1,355 by 500, we see that the third 500 copies cost us $2.71 each.
Now this makes no sense, because once the job is running, every new copy should cost the same. Certainly we don’t expect the cost per copy to jump up! What’s going on here?
What’s going on is that the person who did the pricing is either working from bad source documents (charts, tables, or incorrect software) or else just made a mistake.
But suppose it really does cost $1,355 to produce 500 books. Then the cost for the first 500 should be no more than $3,695 ($5,050 - $1,355), not $4,600.
Or suppose that it really costs $450 to produce 500 books. Then the cost for 1,500 should be no higher than $5,500 ($5,050 + $450), not $6,405.
The numbers I started with are from a real quote from a real printer. I didn’t make them up as a fake example that would never really happen. In this case, the printer will fix the numbers or I’ll use someone else.
The point is that you always have to check the numbers a salesperson gives you. Not checking them can be expensive.
The basics
For the sake of simplicity, I am discussing only book manufacturing in this post. Book manufacturing consist of printing either digitally or by offset and binding the book with a soft or hard cover. There are further divisions within those categories, but we don’t need to concern ourselves with them for this exercise.
In digital printing, a company may have some administrative costs for setting up a new customer and for uploading and checking files, but these costs are modest and may or may not be itemized on a customer bill. Once the files for a book are loaded onto a server, every copy costs the same amount to produce, from the first to the millionth. The printer may offer some volume discounts as incentives, but the price per copy does not drop rapidly. If you’re going to save money, it will be in ordering quantities that are efficient to ship. The printing and binding costs don’t change much, if at all.
In offset printing, on the other hand, the cost to set up the job is significant, whereas the cost to produce each additional copy of the book is quite low. As more and more of the prepress tasks are automated, the setup costs keep coming down, but they are still important in pricing.
That’s where your trusty calculator comes in
When you get printing quotes, typically you will ask for pricing on two or three different quantities. A given printer may suggest that the lowest quantity might work out better printed digitally and the higher quantities should be printed offset, but you can get all quantities quoted both ways if you want to and if the job could go either way. Some books can only be printed offset, for a variety of reasons.
But now you’re looking at the quotes. You can see that the digital prices don’t change much, if at all, with quantity. That’s as it should be. But then you look at the offset prices and you see this:
500 $9.20/copyWhat can you learn from that?
1,000 $5.05/copy
1,500 $4.27/copy
The first step is to multiply out the totals:
500 @ $9.20/copy = $4,600The next step is to subtract to find the differences between totals:
1,000 @ $5.05/copy = $5,050
1,500 @ $4.27/copy = $6,405
500 @ $9.20/copy = $4,600What do those numbers tell us?
1,000 @ $5.05/copy = $5,050 = $4,600 + $450
1,500 @ $4.27/copy = $6,405 = $5,050 + $1,355
The difference in cost between 500 copies and 1,000 copies is $450. If we divide $450 by 500, we see that the second 500 copies cost $0.90 each.
The difference in cost between 1,000 copies and 1,500 copies is $1,355. If we divide $1,355 by 500, we see that the third 500 copies cost us $2.71 each.
Now this makes no sense, because once the job is running, every new copy should cost the same. Certainly we don’t expect the cost per copy to jump up! What’s going on here?
What’s going on is that the person who did the pricing is either working from bad source documents (charts, tables, or incorrect software) or else just made a mistake.
But suppose it really does cost $1,355 to produce 500 books. Then the cost for the first 500 should be no more than $3,695 ($5,050 - $1,355), not $4,600.
Or suppose that it really costs $450 to produce 500 books. Then the cost for 1,500 should be no higher than $5,500 ($5,050 + $450), not $6,405.
The numbers I started with are from a real quote from a real printer. I didn’t make them up as a fake example that would never really happen. In this case, the printer will fix the numbers or I’ll use someone else.
The point is that you always have to check the numbers a salesperson gives you. Not checking them can be expensive.
Friday, May 28, 2010
The do-it-yourself picture book. Or not.
Got a call yesterday. Printing rep I’ve done business with. (He’s an American who represents a printer in Asia, and he’s a straight shooter.) Wanted my advice on a job.
He had been sent a book to quote on, a do-it-yourself job on which the “yourself” who did it was a clueless amateur. The printer in Asia had raised an alarm that the files would not result in a high-quality book. The printer was loath to take on a job that the customer might complain about after the fact. What did I think?
I asked him to send me a few pages so I could see what was what.
The book consisted of separate one-page PDF files, all of which had been prepared using Photoshop. Each page was a montage of photographs (of a deceased pop icon) with cutlines. Now it’s true that Photoshop files can include a text layer consisting of font outlines, and in a few instances the author took advantage of this. But most of the type was rendered as part of the composite image. Type rendered that way (as a raster image) does not print with sharp, clean outlines. The edges of the letters are either fuzzy or jagged (a choice available to the designer). This guy chose jagged (probably unintentionally), but neither of those choices is really the right one. The right choice is to use Photoshop for optimizing photographs and to build pages in a page layout application, such as InDesign.
There were other problems too. The photographs were a long way from being optimized for printing. Colors were not corrected, black and white photos did not have their tones adjusted. Scanned newspaper halftones were not descreened. And in any case, it was not at all clear that the author had the rights to reproduce all of these images (perhaps he did, but if not, this could have exposed the printer to a lawsuit).
I said I thought the book could be redone by a professional, using the existing files as a design dummy, for something in the neighborhood of ten thousand dollars, maybe more.
My advice was to recommend redoing the book to the author. The second choice would be to collect prepayment in full for the printing and get an ironclad, lawsuit-proof contract stating that any quality problems resulting from printing the files as furnished were the author’s fault, not the printer’s fault. But because we all know there is no such thing as a lawsuit-proof contract and because the author already had a bid from a U.S. printer who saw no problems with the files, my buddy decided he didn’t need the money enough to risk bidding the job. He passed.
In the end, the author will get his books. But he’ll pay through the nose for them and the quality will still be terrible. All because he figured he could save money by doing the work himself. My guess? He would have been both time and money ahead had he hired a professional book designer in the first place.
Self-publishing is not the same as do-it-yourself publishing.
He had been sent a book to quote on, a do-it-yourself job on which the “yourself” who did it was a clueless amateur. The printer in Asia had raised an alarm that the files would not result in a high-quality book. The printer was loath to take on a job that the customer might complain about after the fact. What did I think?
I asked him to send me a few pages so I could see what was what.
The book consisted of separate one-page PDF files, all of which had been prepared using Photoshop. Each page was a montage of photographs (of a deceased pop icon) with cutlines. Now it’s true that Photoshop files can include a text layer consisting of font outlines, and in a few instances the author took advantage of this. But most of the type was rendered as part of the composite image. Type rendered that way (as a raster image) does not print with sharp, clean outlines. The edges of the letters are either fuzzy or jagged (a choice available to the designer). This guy chose jagged (probably unintentionally), but neither of those choices is really the right one. The right choice is to use Photoshop for optimizing photographs and to build pages in a page layout application, such as InDesign.
There were other problems too. The photographs were a long way from being optimized for printing. Colors were not corrected, black and white photos did not have their tones adjusted. Scanned newspaper halftones were not descreened. And in any case, it was not at all clear that the author had the rights to reproduce all of these images (perhaps he did, but if not, this could have exposed the printer to a lawsuit).
I said I thought the book could be redone by a professional, using the existing files as a design dummy, for something in the neighborhood of ten thousand dollars, maybe more.
My advice was to recommend redoing the book to the author. The second choice would be to collect prepayment in full for the printing and get an ironclad, lawsuit-proof contract stating that any quality problems resulting from printing the files as furnished were the author’s fault, not the printer’s fault. But because we all know there is no such thing as a lawsuit-proof contract and because the author already had a bid from a U.S. printer who saw no problems with the files, my buddy decided he didn’t need the money enough to risk bidding the job. He passed.
In the end, the author will get his books. But he’ll pay through the nose for them and the quality will still be terrible. All because he figured he could save money by doing the work himself. My guess? He would have been both time and money ahead had he hired a professional book designer in the first place.
Self-publishing is not the same as do-it-yourself publishing.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Sunday, May 16, 2010
It's about time
I’ve been so busy of late that I have of necessity neglected the blog. As a quick update, I finally got around to adding a few books to the sidebar that I should have added months ago. RSS subscribers will have to click through to see them.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Battle of Black and Dogs at Yale Rep
Pointless. Dated. Gratuitous in more ways than I care to describe. Go out to dinner instead.
Should I mention that the actors did a great job with awful material or that the lighting and set were fully up to Yale Rep standards? All that’s true, but there is still no reason to subject yourself to this black dog of a play.
Should I mention that the actors did a great job with awful material or that the lighting and set were fully up to Yale Rep standards? All that’s true, but there is still no reason to subject yourself to this black dog of a play.
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