Wednesday afternoon I sent a book to a printer. The book in question is 584 pages and includes 192 images, many of which are bleeds; and numerous tint blocks, some with special visual effects. The book will be printed in softcover and lithowrap hardcover with dust jacket, so there were three separate covers in the package. The cover design incorporates white text dropped out of a background, colored text on a tinted background, and other effects.
Friday at 6:15 am, FedEx picked up the proofs for the book from the printer. The entire job, in other words, went from submitted files to completed proofs in about a day and a half.
When I heard from the printer that the proofs had shipped, I thought back to my days working for a book printer in the early 1980s.
To begin with, manuscripts came to us as typewritten pages with handwritten editorial redaction. These typewritten pages may have been produced on a word processor rather than on a conventional typewriter, but we were not yet at the stage where publishers could reliably send manuscripts electronically. Initially, we relied on accurate markup by editors and the knowledge and training of our keyboard operators to correctly translate the author’s raw, unmarked typescript into all the right fonts and line lengths and indents and spacing. Later we introduced a modern, computer-mediated system for which a couple of us received training in the special markup codes the system required. The keyboard operators just typed those codes, and the computer took care of the fonts and spacing. But every character still required a keystroke.
The output of the typesetting system was a light-tight cartridge of exposed, photosensitive paper that had then to be carried to the darkroom and run through a film processor. The processed galleys were proofread, and new galleys were processed again and delivered to me. I cut them apart, ran them through a waxer (a machine that spread a thin coating of melted wax on the back), and pasted up pages.
Meanwhile, photographs came as glossy photo prints. Each one had to be measured with a densitometer to determine the correct exposure needed on the copy camera (a Brobdingnagian version of the type of camera you might envision Matthew Brady using). I then had to determine what percentage to enlarge or reduce the image, make a number of camera settings, place the image on the copy board, go into the darkroom (the back of the camera), cut a piece of film the right size, load the film, load the halftone screen in front of the film, expose it, expose it again to make the dots the right size, and run the film through the film processor. It was hard to make more than ten or a a dozen good halftones an hour. Each had to then be printed on photo paper to create a low-quality print to be waxed and positioned on the page.
The complex sort of pages involved in the book I just sent off to the printer would have taken about fifteen minutes each to paste up, once I had the corrected galleys and the photo prints in hand. So if you’re keeping a running tally, that’s roughly nine weeks of typesetting, two days of making halftones, and three weeks, with overtime, of paste-up. But let’s not count the typesetting or the paste-up, because, after all, I did send made-up pages to the printer. We have to count the two days in the darkroom, though.
Next, once all the pasted up pages were proofread in house, copies of them were sent to the customer for checking, and corrections were made (figure two or three days altogether), I took the pasted up pages and went back to the copy camera, this time making large negatives of four pages each. Two more days.
With the page negatives and the halftones in hand, I then had to carefully position them on large sheets of mylar (one sheet for the page negatives, another for the halftones) over a ruled master that I had spent an hour or so creating. For each sheet of mylar (holding 16 pages), I had to cut a vinyl mask so that only the correct content would be exposed (text from the page negatives, and just the correctly cropped area from each halftone). Pages with screen tints required additional steps, including complicated multiple exposures in the darkroom. Altogether another week and a half of work. Two more days just to expose the proofing material and cut and fold the proofs.
And after all of that, all I would have to show for my efforts would be a proof of the black-and-white pages. I would not have begun to work on the covers yet.
The small company I worked for did not do its own color separations. I would have spent at least a day, perhaps two, doing the multilayer comprehensives for the covers, but then they would have gone out to a color shop, at a cost of several hundred dollars, to prepare the color separation negatives that would come back to me for stripping. I would have then gone into the darkroom with the color separations and made duplicates so we could print the covers two-up. That, plus stripping three different cover forms and proofing them, would have occupied another couple of days.
Are you keeping track? That’s close to three weeks of work, in the early 1980s, to get from camera-ready pages to proofs ready to send the customer. Instead of the day and a half it takes now.
But the work I did back then as an offset lithographer was comparably fast and efficient in relation to what would have been done thirty years earlier, in a letterpress plant.
Zoom.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Wednesday, July 07, 2010
Traveling to Italy?
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.
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.
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.
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