printing pdf's vs. books - cost comparison?

[Krieg]

For those folks thinking about using the printers at work, be sure to get approval from your company beforehand. Most companies would consider such use of company property to be stealing.

On the issue of binding, you can always buy a thermal tape or spiral bound binding machine and do it yourself at home. If you print out a lot of .pdfs it will definitely save you money in the long run.

 

[philreed]

For me, the ink costs were irrelevant since I was printing them off at work. It's the binding that starts to add up. Afterall, you can't have hundreds of books in loose page format; that's a recipe for disaster!

Several years ago I bought a thermal binder and thousands of covers when an office supply store went out of business. The oncoming of PDFs made that purchase well worth the money.

Poke around at eBay . . . I'm betting you could find a personal binding system for a low price.

 

[Malakor]

I bought an inexpensive Comb Binder a few years back for around $50 at the local Office Depot since I have a tendency to design 20+ page character "sheets" and also like to bind my adventures that I write to keep them together.

Since the explosion of pdf products, it has come in quite handy. Like the coil binding mentioned earlier, it can be laid flat when using it, unfortunately it doesn't lend itself well to being folded back on itself.

I've been doing some searching for an affordable coil binder, something under $250 or so, but my Comb binder works quite nicely in the interim.

Personally, I'd just as soon see a lot of the gaming products come out as coil bound products, but that's just the opinion of an old fart who likes the stuff he handles a lot to be convenient

 

[Ogrork the Mighty]

For those folks thinking about using the printers at work, be sure to get approval from your company beforehand. Most companies would consider such use of company property to be stealing.

Absolutely.

 

[Nellisir]

I print the larger pdfs, the ones I'm most interested in and most likely to read over a long period of time (or in the can). I can print 2-sided on my printer, and I use the lowest ink setting for most pdfs. I've started taking them to Kinko's and having them tape-bound with a cardstock cover. The cardstock gives it a little rigidity, and the tape spine is nice and square, so the pdfs can sit right on the shelf with the rest of my gaming books.
Endurance seems to be very good -- I've been beating on my Book of Templates for a few months now, and it's holding up perfectly.

Cheers
Nell.

 

[Tav_Behemoth]

One relevant idea we're trying with the Masters and Minions books is a print-and-PDF package: when you buy the professionally printed book, you get the PDF for free.

For the print edition, economies of scale mean that our printing cost per page is quite small due to the large print run, and the lamination of the cover and the perfect-binding of the spine are (IMHO) better than you'd get from a copy shop or most home equipment. And having the PDF as well gives you the flexibility of printing just the pages you need to give to players or to put in a binder, cutting and pasting the electronic text into your own documents, etc.

It works the other way too: registered owners of the PDF can upgrade to the print edition just by paying the difference in their prices, which compares favorably to having Kinko's print the whole thing (and gets better covers and binding). So $7.50 will get you the 60-page minotaur PDF; another $7.50 gets you the printed book, which is normally $15. (This is true even if you got the registered PDF for free, like as a thank-you for the server donation drive).

Has anyone had problems with Kinko's saying they're not allowed to print a PDF because it's copyright material? Hasn't happened to me, but I've heard stories of Kinko's saying this is store policy and people not being able to convince them that they're rightful owners of the PDF and allowed to print it for personal use.

 

[Krieg]

Tav, those are some very cool ideas, and would definitely influence me to take a second look at a company's products that was offering such a complete package.

 

[skinnydwarf]

That's because it varies from location to location. Generally, something like $0.17 per double-sided page for printing (could be as low as $0.13, depending on location and paper, i've found), and $3-6 for binding, depending on the style you want.

Anyway, to directly answer the question: if i have Kinko's do the printing and binding, i generally end up paying about the same for a PDF (including purchase cost) as for a print book of the same pagecount. Maybe a little more. I don't consider it a sensible option for anything that is also available in hardcopy, if i want it in print. If i don't expect to ever want a print copy, then i might save the money and buy the PDF, especially if my intended use will actually be easier, rather than harder, on screen. OTOH, for something i primarily intend to read, i'll usually buy hardcopy (maybe waiting for a sale), rather than PDF. However, the prices are, generally, close enough that i consider paying to print a PDF viable competition for buying a print book--IOW, if i'm trying to decide which of two different products to buy, i don't consider the PDF-ness a cost factor.

So, all that boils down to: i generally only buy in PDF if there is no hardcopy available, but PDFs get just as much attention from me as print books, even if the work is something i'm definitely going to want in hardcopy.


And that's potentially off by a factor of ten. Every laser printer i've ever really known the numbers for gets 5,000-15,000 pages per cartridge (at typical coverage--i.e., mostly text). And i just did a cursory search online, and the first few hits confirmed that those are perfectly reasonable numbers. So, yes, when you're getting ~10,000 pages for a single ~$100 cartridge, printing at home is a perfectly viable option. And i got my printer used for ~$300. Just wish it duplexed--oh well.

What i usually do is print the interior at home, and then pay Kinko's to print the cover (if it's color) and bind. But, if you don't need your covers in color, you can save a couple dollars right there.

What kind of printers do you guys get? Back when I had my laser printer I was lucky to get 100 pages before the ink ran out (easy to do when working on school papers). Then I had to spend $80 on another cartridge. Man, I hated that printer.

 

[GlassJaw]

For those folks thinking about using the printers at work, be sure to get approval from your company beforehand

LOL!!!!

when you buy the professionally printed book, you get the PDF for free.

This is an awesome idea. Something like this would definitely put me over the edge if I'm considering buying something. I would also give something a closer look that I otherwise might not as well.

 

[Nyarlathotep]

Hmm... let's see, I just bought a laser printer. Over 20,000 pages it works out to something like $0.03 per sheet. Which is a lot of printing....

And since I'm seeing this a lot in this thread: laser printers do not use ink cartridges, they use toner (just like a photocopier). Ink/Bubblejet printers use ink cartridges. Printing PDF's with an inkjet can be expensive... very very expensive. (I probably get a couple of hundred pages on my inkjet before I have to replace the cartridge, I get about 4500 - 5000 on a toner cartridge for my laser printer)