This is the seventh of our scheduled Director’s Briefings. It’s a little later than normal this month as I was on holiday for the latter part of January and have had to perform the necessary catchup.
In last month’s Briefing, we indicated that the entire Spacemaster: Privateers product line was in our sights for rebranding. Our layout gurus have reported that in addition to having font problems, at least some of the Spacemaster: Privateers products were created as multi-language files using Quark Passport, and their build files are steadfastly refusing to open in anything other than that extremely expensive piece of software. As these products have been on sale for up to a decade, the number of expected sales in a reasonable time frame (say one to two years) does not justify anyone buying Quark Passport, I have applied triage and instructed our gurus to do the rebranding of pdf versions by careful application of Photoshop and Adobe. This means that we won’t be able to apply the errata to the Spacemaster products. It is still possible (barely) that we may be able to get the rebranded products into print-on-demand if the interior illustrations have sufficient resolution.
Note, if anyone reading this does own Quark Passport already and has some free time, please do get in touch.
Speaking of print-on-demand, we have three products currently available via OneBookShelf’s print-on-demand arrangement with Lightning Source, namely the Shadow World Player’s Guide, HARP SF and HARP SF Xtreme. From comments in various places, it is clear that there is some confusion as to what this means and some reticence about being the first to order copies.
So what does print-on-demand entail? Let’s compare this with standard pdfs from both the publisher and the customer perspective. When we produce a pdf version of a product, it will typically be a single pdf file and various optimisations will have been performed to keep the file size down. When we produce a print-on-demand version, there will be at least two pdfs. One of those will be the interior of the product with all of the artwork having more than enough resolution so that it looks right at the higher dpi of printing than the 72dpi of screens. The pagecount of this pdf may well differ from that of the screen pdf as there is a requirement that OBS/LS products have interior page counts that are divisible by four (or six in some formats) modulo one – i.e. 127 pages is fine, 131 pages is fine, etc. You will have noted that for HARP SF and HARP SF Xtreme, I solicited opinions on which tables might be usefully repeated on extra end pages that we added to achieve the divisibility modulo one page count.
The other file will be the pdf of the wraparound cover, which will have very high-resolution cover art, a blank area for the ISBN and bar code, and extremely precise dimensions. In a screen pdf, you have the front cover and the back cover. For a printed book, you also have the spine if it is to be perfectbound, and this spine width will vary according to the number of interior pages and indeed whether the book is hardcover, softcover etc. If the dimensions are wrong, you would get a terminally cramped book or one where the pages don’t fill the binding. OBS and Lightning Source are experts at this and have templates that layout experts are required to follow and a series of checks that catch problems like this before any copies of the book are ever printed. For each product, I then upload the appropriate pdf files with separate pairs for each edition (so for HARP SF Xtreme which we offer in four distinct formats, I had four upload sets to do), and these are checked first by OBS and then by Lightning Source. The checking process can take up to a week – if there’s a problem, the files are bounced back with a terse error message that the layout guru will understand, the files are then adjusted and reuploaded to be tested again. If all is well, and only if all is well, Lightning Source will approve the product for printing and the publisher is then invited to get a test copy (in each approved format) printed for themselves before they put it on sale. As we believe in a safety-first approach, I’ve had 4 test copies of each approved print-on-demand version of a product made – one comes to me, one goes to John Seal at Aurigas, one goes to the responsible layout guru (Craig John) for his professional opinion and the fourth goes to Thom Jones also at Aurigas. Lightning Source uses two of their facilities to manufacture rpg books in partnership with OneBookShelf. Craig, John and I get our copies from the UK facility, Thom being based in the USA gets his from the American plant. When we are all happy, I then toggle the switch in the publisher interface at OneBookShelf and the books go on sale in print-on-demand formats.
That’s the perspective from the publisher, so let’s look at things from the customer view. If you are buying one or more pdfs through OneBookShelf, you put them into the shopping cart, pay your money at the checkout, and download the product files at your convenience. So what’s different for print-on-demand. You pick the product(s) that you are interested in, select from the available hardcopy format(s) – softcover versus hardcover, black&white versus colour, and proceed to checkout. You provide a delivery address and choose a shipping method, then pay your money. Then what happens?
OneBookShelf transmits your order to Lightning Source. If your delivery address is the USA, your order goes to the US plant. If the address is anywhere else, your order goes to the UK plant. Lightning Source is true print-on-demand, which means that your copy of a product does not exist in physical form until they print it for you. There’s no huge pile of preprinted copies that they pluck copies from and ship out. You have your own individual print run just for your order. So your order has arrived at the Lightning Source plant and gets queued for printing. The interior of the book and the covers are manufactured separately. The printers roll and generate a block of printed paper that is the inside contents of your requested book. You will remember that the interior page count is divisible by four modulo one. At the end of printing the innards of the product, Lightning Source prints an almost blank page, which has their address and a bar code at the bottom of the page. This identifies your block of paper and enables it to be united with the cover that has been separately printed with a bar code and ISBN that Lightning Source have placed on the cover in the blank area our layout guru prepared for them. Bar codes are matched and innards and cover are suitably bound together and the product is packed and shipped to you. At various stages in the process, you can log into OneBookShelf and see the status of your order – sent to Lightning Source, printed, shipped and/or shipped with a tracking number. In due course, the postman delivers a parcel to your door.
Depending on the format, the manufacturing time is two working days for softcover products that have black&white interiors up to five working days for products with colour interiors. If your order has products in a mixture of formats, Lightning Source may split the order and ship the books as two or more parcels (just like Amazon and some of the other big Internet retailers). If this happens, the status notices in your OneBookShelf account will reflect it and the delivery note in the parcels will make it clear that the order has been split.
Both GCP and Aurigas are aware that many ICE customers did not receive printed books that they ordered from Mjolnir in a timely fashion. In addition to sending test copies, we’ve also had a number of complimentary copies printed and shipped to GCP freelancers who’ve been involved in the various products, so we can confirm that the process works reliably and that products have already reached these individuals in the UK, USA, Canada and even as far away as Australia. From the notices that I get from OneBookShelf, we also know that copies have been purchased by early adopter customers and shipped to these nations and various countries in mainland Europe. You do not have to take my word for it – you’ll find posts on the ICE forums from happy satisfied customers. For those who have already taken the plunge, do let us know what you think about the print-on-demand service.
The next scheduled Director’s Briefing will be presented in early March.
Best wishes,
Nicholas
Director, Guild Companion Publications Ltd.
