I have been planning to print maybe 5 copies of a full-sized (8x10) book of maybe 500 double-sided pages, color and lots of photographs.
I also wanted maybe 5 copies of a similar book of 120 double sided pages.
When I started talking to printers and pricing this out...I was getting estimates like $3,500 to print the books.
Well, I was going to forget the whole thing, but then decided that I should probably try just getting my own good printer and printing out all the pages myself, then just going to someone for binding.
But I am no expert in printers at all. Given all these pages, I need to ensure:
1. low cost per page (color and images)
2. image quality is important
I welcome any advice or recommendations with respect to appropriate options.
Thanks for your help.
Quite a few things to address here. Some already have by other members and I may just put a slightly different twist on them, others will be new.
Offset printing costs are very high for a few copies . The per copy cost goes way down when doing huge quantities but a lot of printers are using digital printers/copiers to output things such as multi color business cards these days because it is a quite affordable alternative. However, business cards are going to be 6-up or 9 up in most cases and it is still cheaper to do 1000 or 1500 than it is to have 500 done.
Image Quality: You can get very high image quality from home printers. I was amazed by the prints I got from a small Canon I got free with one of my computers
But the problem for you is not so much image quality as longevity. Because of the technology involved, your prints off a small home printer will start to fade fairly quickly. How quickly depends on how much of light of day they see but, in the long run, home printers are not a viable option for books. Printers used by commercial photo shops are worth way more than the $3,500 you seem to find expensive... but the prints will last a very long time. Some of them actually use an analog photographic printing process on photo paper from what I was explained.
500 or even 120 pages: You've got to be kidding. Take any magazine and measure it than do a quick calculation to figure out the thickness of your 500 pages. Now, what you have just come up with is something printed on offset paper which has no equivalent in the photo paper world. Thin photo paper, which would not be as thin as a magazine page, buckles pretty bad. Your book would end up 5 to 8 times (or more) as thick as the 500 page magazine.
Low Cost and Quality: Those two are very rarely seen together. Good art books are not cheap, some of them are actually quite expensive and are produced by specialized printing houses because the printing of art is an art in itself.
Lots of photographs: That to me means there will also be text and that is a big problem. Text looks better off a laser printer while photos look better off of printers that are not laser. So, will you be able to segregate the text from the photos where the printing is concerned? Will you be able to run the same paper through both printers?
So, yes, you may want to forget the whole thing.
Then again, you don't say much about what it is exactly you are trying to do so it is very hard to judge. Maybe Blurb can do what you want. I don't remember being impressed by their product but it might be enough for you. Or maybe you just want to do a one of a kind book. Those are not uncommon in the art world. I've done a few myself. Hand stitched, hand bound, etc.
By the way, magazine quality doesn't really mean much. There are cheaply printed magazines and then there are others you could take the pages out of and frame them. Some European photo magazines of the pre-digital age come to mind.
You are talking about stitched binding for the 500 page book. Have you taken this into account for the design? You need to.
