It’s an old-fashioned thing for a proponent of electronic publishing to say, but sometimes paper is just better. That’s especially true for long-form works like novels and reference tomes, which I much prefer to have at hand instead of on screen.
That’s why I was disappointed to learn recently that Printfu is no longer with us. Printfu was a simple, cheap service for printing, binding and shipping PDFs. You could get a 250-page PDF in a smart binding for less than $15 including shipping simply by providing a link to a PDF. The service bridged the “paper gap” presented by large electronic documents that are too time- and toner-intensive to print on your own and, at a typical price of 30 cents/page, too expensive to print at Kinko’s or other copy shops.
Now that Printfu has gone south, I’m casting about for an inexpensive means to provide printed versions of the Big Medium 2 guide and the Prototype.js documentation. (Both will, of course, remain available for free download, but I’d like to make bound paper versions available for those who want them.)
Happily, it seems that the world of print-on-demand books has come of age since the last time I checked in. Lulu.com appears especially promising as a way to self-publish my reference guides, offering a price that’s competitive with what Printfu offered along with some notable improvements:
- “Perfect bound” paperback binding
- International shipping
- Transactions in dollars, euros or pounds
I hope to give Lulu.com a spin in the next couple of weeks and, if all goes well, I should be able to resume offering dead-tree versions of these books by the end of the month. If you have experience with Lulu.com as either a buyer or publisher, I’d love to hear about it.
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