blog.booki.cc

I have worked with http://dbusiness.de/ in Berlin. They are also good. I have not tried their color covers but if you print black and white covers (not too much black though else it gets washed out) the results are excellent. We did both the Open Web (http://openweb.flossmanuals) and the Collaborative Futures books their in runs of 300 or so and they were cheap and fast.

We just printed 100 bound copies of our “Understanding CiviCRM” booki book for our annual US conference. The service, price and quality were outstanding compared to Lulu.com (especially screenshots – which looked great in the new printing). If you’re in the vicinity and looking for a printer, I’d recommend them.

Quartet Digital Printing

http://www.quartetcopies.com/home.htm

I have recently been using a Samsung ML-2850 Duplex printer for creating books with book-formatted PDF (generated by Booki). In order to do this I made a script to manipulate the PDF so that I had two A5 manuals side by side on an A4. When I had run the commands for this on a manual the size was increased dramatically. One manual went up from 1.6 MB to 10 MB or so.

After doing this I discovered that some manuals would print only a few pages on my printer and then stop, and others would not print at all. After a lot of hair pulling I discovered that the default printing system in Ubuntu (CUPS) does not manage printing large files very well and hence the printer was dying because it didnt have enough memory available to complete the job. I took a long time to work this out since there is not much documentation about this online, additionally it has hard to discover what kind of memory is needed for a specific printer online AND all the electronic shops I visited knew nothing about printer memory.

CUPS revealed no information in the error logs…so after some frustration I finally wrote a little script to print the double sided pages 2 at a time. This actually worked. I still had a little issue that if too many jobs were sent to the printer (too many double page print requests at any one time) the printer could still also die. So…I slowed the speed in which the requests where made and….it worked! I’m very sad the printer doesnt print it straight off but I am also glad this hack seems to work…posting here incase anyone else has a similar issue…the script could be optimised a lot!

#!/bin/bash
c=0
PAGES='/usr/bin/pdfinfo $1 |  grep Pages | tr -dc '[0-9]''
COUNT=1
SLEEP=0

while [  $COUNT -le $PAGES ] ; do
  echo "print ".$COUNT "-"  $((COUNT+1))
  lpr -P ML-2850-Series -o Resolution=600x600dpi -o PageSize=A4 /
     -o Duplex=DuplexTumble -o page-ranges=$COUNT-$((COUNT+1)) $1
  sleep 17
  ((COUNT++))
  ((COUNT++))
  ((SLEEP++))
done

Recently I was hunting around for free software PDF readers. Here is a good list:

http://www.pdfreaders.org/

The PDF readers I have tried for Ubuntu (Linux) include kpdf, evince (the default viewer), okular, ghostview (gs), and xpdf. Of these I prefer evince for its simplicity.

One big downside of the free software readers is that none of them enable booklet printing. Acroreader is not free but enables printing of booklets for any PDF. It would be fantastic to see this feature in evince as otherwise you need a script to create the booklet out of a standard PDF, then open it and print it the standard way.

It is possible to create booklets using scripts. There is the PDFBook script that does a good job (http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/support/pdfbook/) and it is also possible to use shell scripts to process PDF using the pdfnup command to create booklets. I recently wanted to print the same PDF side by side on a single A4 so I wrote the following script to do the job:

#!/bin/bash
pdftk $1 burst
for f in pg_*
 do
   pdftk $f $f cat output $f.pdf
   rm $f
done

for g in pg_*
 do
   pdfnup --nup 2x1 $g --outfile $g.pdf
   rm $g
done

pdftk pg_* cat output $1_combined.pdf
rm pg_*

Seems to work ok albeit a little inefficient.

After the recent Thunderbird book sprint, an idea about getting a few printed copies of the manual popped into my head. I’m not usually one for killing trees, and try to avoid printing whenever possible. But I thought a physical book would be a nice addition to the portfolios of the technical writing students who took part in the sprint.

And, wouldn’t you know it, the idea stuck in my head. So, like most ideas that stick in my head, I figured this was a good one. The problem was how to economically get a small run of the manual printed.

I thought about online services like Lulu.com and Lightning Source, but figured the cost of initial setup and shipping would be more than I was willing to pay. The local printers I approached weren’t interested in my small print run.

Then the word Espresso Book Machine (EBM) popped into my head.

Espresso Book Machine?

The EBM is essentially an automated print-on-demand rig. You feed it a couple of PDFs — the book and its cover — and the machine prints, binds, and cuts the book. It takes about four or five minutes for the EBM to produce a finished book. The quality is quite good, too.

It had been over a year since I last checked the EBM Web site. As I recalled, there were several units in Canada but, crucially, none in Toronto (where I live). But a quick check of the site revealed that there is now an EBM at the downtown location of the University of Toronto bookstore.

Publishing the manual

The first part was simple. I used Objavi (the export engine of Booki) to generate a B5-sized PDF. Why B5? That’s the size I was using during the sprint to get a page count, and it’s a nice size for a book.

As for the cover, that was a different story. To say that my graphic design skills are rudimentary is being generous. I couldn’t come up with a good design to save my life. So I followed the format used with the FLOSS Manuals (http://en.flossmanuals.net) being sold on Lulu.com — simple white cover, the title of the book, and a logo. I created the cover in Inkscape, an Open Source vector graphics program. Inkscape has a nifty feature that can generate a template for a book cover. I had to use the Inkscape manual to figure out how to use it, but in the end I got a cover.

From there, I loaded the two PDFs on a flash drive and trekked over to the University of Toronto bookstore. There was a little back and forth with the bookstore (the sizing of the cover was off), but once that was fixed I had a printed manual within a couple of days.

Here’s what the finished product looks like:

You’re probably thinking This is supposed to be print-on-demand. Why did it take a couple of days. Timing. Bad timing on my part. The EBM at the bookstore caters to professors at the University of Toronto, and my job got stuck in a backlog.

While I wanted to shoot a video or take some photos of the manual being printed, I couldn’t work my schedule around it. If you’re interested, you can see videos of the EBM in action here and here.

Overall thoughts

The Espresso Book Machine did quite a good job of printing and binding the Thunderbird manual. The service was fast and the books look really good. The price isn’t too bad — about four cents a page. On top of that, there’s a small setup fee. Obviously, it’s not as cheap as using the gear in the Booki Mobile.

I have another project that I’m thinking of using Booki to write and publish. When I need printed copies of that work, I’ll definitely turn to the EBM again.

ISBN stands for “International Standard Book Number”. It is a 13 digit number that identifies your book. No two ISBN numbers are the same ad they usually appear on your book in numeric form and as a bar code. Generally you buy ISBN numbers and each country manages this slightly differently. Some countries require you to be a publisher before you can order an ISBN. In the USA I believe you buy them in blocks of 10 whereas in new Zealand I believe they give them away.

If you wish to distribute a book through established book channels then you mostly need an ISBN. Book shops such as Barnes & Noble or your local book shop require ISBN so they can track, sell and order stock (books). Most online retailers of any size also require this – Amazon for example, require ISBN if you wish to sell through their channels. However some online channels do not require ISBN – lulu.com for example.

The big problem with ISBN is that you need a new ISBN for every new edition. So if you release a book and then edit it and re-release it you need 2 ISBN numbers. This can take a long time to order and process and it can be expensive (depending on how you get your ISBN).

However this is not the real issue. Admin takes a long time, we are all used to it. However sometimes an administrative system gets built to work for a certain model and when that model changes then things stop making sense.

ISBN works well in a publishing world where books take years to produce and the products are identifiable distinct bodies of work. However, in the world of Booki this is not the typical process. For example, when working with a Book Sprint team we typically write and release a book in 5 days. You can register the ISBN before the event, no problem. However quite often after the event we may ‘release’ a new version of the book 5,10, 15 times in one day. Some of these releases may be substantial revisions. This quite clearly does not sit neatly with the slow ISBN process. Even with a more conservative development cycle for a ‘Booki book’ the implication is clear – ISBN expects content to be static, it does not expect books to ‘live’.

Its a real problem for free content and content that exists in an environment where ongoing contributions to the source are encouraged. If you manage a book like this in Booki and you wish to distribute the book through traditional distribution channels then there is a point where you must ‘freeze’ the content and release the ‘snapshot’. This is not altogether satisfying since then you must either still the book – make it ‘die’ for a time so the printed work and the source remain equal, or you must acknowledge that the paper version is a quick to be outdated archive.

Letting content die or temporarily freezing contributions can kill a book, which is not a very desirable result considering it often takes a lot of work soliciting ongoing contributions in the first place. The alternative, accepting that the printed book is an archive is probably not going to make many distributors very happy since you are asking them to sell an out of date product (although this is conjecture since I have never tried this).

My answer to this dilemma is to actually walk away from traditional distribution channels. Free content should travel freely across media and infront of the eyes (and ears in the case of audio books) of whoever wants it and in whatever form they want it. Let the content go, don’t constrain it to these traditional channels.

Typically these channels are pursued however for ‘legacy’ reasons. Some you can’t escape – if you are an academic you live off ISBN and the education system will be slow to change that. However, if its a business model you are after then don’t make the mistake to think that selling books is the only way to go…new models are emerging – get people to pay you to write the content, for example. One such successful example of this is the Rural Design Collective who successfully raised $2000 (US) via kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com/ & http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rdcHQ/rural-design-collective-2010-summer-mentoring-prog).

So there are alternatives. ISBN is blocking the way, but its probably about time to start believing there are better ways….

I have been experiencing quite a strange phenomenon recently. On several occasions I have found myself looking for printers that can print perfect bound books quickly. A ‘perfect bound’ book is a book that is normally called a ‘paperback’  – black and white interior, color cover, and a nice thick one piece cover that tightly hugs the outside of the book and is creased and folded along the spine.

Perfect Bound books printed in less than 20 hours

I have needed these services after a Book Sprint – typically I have spent 5 days in a room with half a dozen others and we have written a book of 300 pages or so. We output the content to book-formatted PDF with Objavi and now, to make it a real party, we want to see the book the same day we finished it or the next morning. It is entirely possible to do this and I have done it many times. However, the one thing that might catch you out is actually finding the right type of printer that can make perfect bound books fast. This is not easy and sometimes made harder if you are in a non-english speaking country as the english term ‘perfect bound’ does not easily translate.

What I have found is that most large cities have these services. In Berlin, for example, there is a service about 5 blocks away from my house. In Paris you need to travel out to the suburbs to find a service but there is one, in Palo Alto Kinkos does it (but doesn’t do it well)…etc….

While these services are relatively common what I have found time and time again is that these services are very hard to find. The first issue is that they have no standard way of marketing their services. It is sometimes advertised as ‘print on demand’, sometimes ‘books on demand’ and sometimes they just don’t let people know they have these services until you ask. Hence trying to find a business that does this via a search engine, a phone book, or asking a local just gets you nowhere. You have to call every printer one by one, carefully explaining exactly what you want. Sometimes this is also difficult since the operators might not be printers and so they don’t actually know the terminology and I have found myself trying to explain what ‘perfect binding’ is to a ‘printer’.

The other issue, and this is the one that I find strange and has tripped me up so many times, is that often the locals – printers and non-printers alike – do not think this kind of service exists at all. That is, they think its impossible. This frustrates me the most.

Essentially there are two typical responses from printers that do not provide this kind of service. The first is from your typical ‘copy shop’ – they will tell you they provide these services and then, when you turn up to look at the samples, you find they are talking about spiral or tape binding. Ugh. After explaining this is not ‘perfect binding’ the normal response is a blank stare and a comment that ‘it is not possible’ and furthermore if they acknowledge that maybe it is possible the copy shop assistants, not usually knowing the printing industry very well, will have no idea who might be able to do this.

The next kind of response comes from your traditional offset printer. They will tell you they can make a book but you have to get 200 done, it will take a week, and it will cost you a lot per book and expensive set-up costs. When explained that this is not what you want they will understand what perfect binding is, and they do know the local print industry, but they will not think doing this is possible or have any idea who might be able to give more information about where to find such a service.

I have been through this process many times. My advice is – it can be done. You can find, in most large cities, printers that will print a book in hours and print it cheaply. Recently in Paris we had 50 books (300 pages) printed for 6 euro each, no set up costs, and delivered in less than 20 hours. It could have been faster if we had less printed. Often 1 book can be done ‘on the spot’. So don’t give up. Its perfectly possible to get the job done, the hardest part is finding the people who can do it…