Has lulu worked for you? I was going to print some items I purchased from OneBookStore (DriveThru), these items do not have a POD option from the seller
for clarication, I am just trying to make personal copy of legally purchased pdf
That's what I've done as well: printing personal copies of game books which have no print option. So far I've done this for two books (the
Everquest II Spell Guide and
Ivid the Undying, the latter using a fan-made PDF of the original RTF file which WotC released on their website for free). The former has already arrived, and the latter book is currently in the mail.
When you start a new project (i.e. tell them you want them to print something for you), they ask you if it's for personal use or publishing to sell; I've always said for personal use, and they haven't instituted any other oversight as to whether or not I owned the work in question or the images used (for example, the covers; I had to grab a generic Everquest image to use as the back cover for the
Spell Guide). Even when I asked someone on their site for help with an issue I was having, no one suggested that there was any sort of problem in that regard.
What was more of an issue was the actual process. I ran into numerous problems, though in hindsight almost all of them were relatively easy to solve, e.g. being told that the PDF I'd uploaded had "fonts which were not embedded" was solved by doing doing a "print" option for the PDF, and selecting the print-to-PDF option; apparently that embeds fonts.
The single largest issue I faced in both cases, however, were the covers. I never used Lulu's cover templates, instead electing to upload custom covers, and in every case it was a chore. You have to upload a PDF of both covers as a single file, and it must be sized correctly for the book that you're printing. For someone with very few file-manipulation skills such as myself, and no real programs in that regard, it was quite cumbersome; fortunately there are plenty of websites that do this sort of thing for free, but finding the cover images I wanted (usually in JPG format), tailoring how they looked in MS Paint (yes, I'm that technologically challenged), putting them side-by-side in a single file, turning it into a PDF, and then resizing it to what lulu wanted (typically listed in millimeters), was a multi-step process that was monstrously hard the first time, but got much easier later on.
Also, if you want to have anything on the spine of your book, you'll need to look at lulu's preview of the cover and then figure out how to free-hand that onto your combined covers file (or at least, I did).
If that all sounds like too much effort to go through, I'll also say that getting the books printed was absolutely worthwhile, and I'm looking forward to receiving the second one in the mail. Having print books that no one else has is quite something!
