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Message: <blockquote data-quote="unobserved" data-source="post: 4121350" data-attributes="member: 63104">First of all the printer needs to get the files for the book and set them up to do a press test. It's usually a lo-res output of the book to make sure that all the pages are aligned properly and in the correct order. For a single book of 300 pages, that process itself could take a long time (depending on the size of the printer), but say the printer spits back the books in a week.Then there's all the pre-press double-checking. 300 pages x 3 books of eyeballing every element of every page to make sure bleeds, margin, knock-outs and what-not were all set correctly. No point in short changing the time required here, years of work can be shot to hell if you let errors go to print. So say Wizards spends a week, maybe two going through all their double checks.Then they've got to get the corrections back to the printer. Now the printer will run a full colour test and send the full colour proofs back to Wizards for review. Again, maybe a week or so.Once you have the colour proofs you'll want to repeat all the checks from the previous process here to make sure nothing was missed but also now you're checking to make sure that the colours on the press match the colours that were spec'd in the design. Some times you'll need to make corrections to the artwork, other times you'll need to ask the guys running the press to tweak the saturation of certain colours in certain areas. So say maybe another week.So say it's now taken you a month or so just to make sure that a) what you sent to the printers was 100% correct and b) it will come off the press looking exactly how you want it too.Now the printer has to do the actual printing.Probably one book will be run at a time on one single press (more if the print shop is larger). Someone from Wizards will probably be there to make sure that everything is coming off the press exactly as it should, otherwise whole batches get thrown out and restarted.Sections of each book will be printed at once (usually pages of 16 or 32 or some other multiple of 4). Those pages will then need to dry properly and then be bound together and then bound to the cover. In between each section being printed the press will need to be changed and setup to print the next section.I don't know what size of a first run they're printing but probably at least 100,000 or more books. This whole process could take weeks or a month.Then they'll need to be all shipped up and sent out to distributors around the world that will then ship them out to individual stores. Again this whole process could take weeks to make sure the books get from printer to distributor to stores.When all's said and done, 3 months doesn't really seem like that much time to get the book out the door.</blockquote>

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