Here's some information that you might want to know in case you want to print Paged Out! at a professional printer (printing company).
Please contact us to get specific PDFs per your selected printing company's recommendations (we can give you "generic" ones as well; they weight about 1GB each though, so we're not puting them on the website just yet). Please also note that we might be unable to accomodate every kind of request due to the (weird) nature of how we prepare PDFs.
Furthermore, if you are sponsoring the print where copies will be given away for free, you should reach out to us for a custom cover PDF with your logo on the backcover :)
Disclaimer: Were are still learning this ourselves, so this page will be updated from time to time. Also, this page contains only the most basic information — enough to get a print — maybe even a decent one. If you have any hints or spotted any mistakes, let us know.
Note: If you want to print copies of Paged Out! and sell them, you'll need a commercial license.
Table of Content:
There are two major printing techniques printing companies offer: digital printing and offset printing.
Digital printing is in essence the same technology your home printer is using — the printers are just bigger, faster, and more complex. Digital printing services commonly advertise themselves as being able to print even just 1 copy, as there's very little overhead in the process for them. At the same time, the cost per copy is higher than offset printing (e.g. 10 CHF vs 2 CHF per copy).
Offset printing on the other hand is exactly the thing that comes to one's mind you when thinking about a printing company — huge rollers transfering whole pages at the same time. By the virtue of using an "at scale" technique, the print itself per copy is much cheaper than in digital print, but making the plates is pretty expensive (in the order of 1000 CHF). Furthermore, these plates have a limited lifespan — both in number of impressions they can be used for (counted in tens or hundreds of thousands) and storage time.
The rule of thumb is to use digital for anything between 1 to a few hundred copies, and offset above that, as it becomes way cheaper per copy. From a mathematical point of view there is a place where these two cost functions (digital and offset per copy) cross, but it can really differ between printing companies.
Quality-wise nowadays it's hard to distinguish the two unless you know what you're looking for, but offset might have a slight advantage here.
Important Hint: Ask multiple printing companies for price estimates, as prices tend to be all over the place. Seriously, do this — you might save a lot of money.
Hint: When asking for the price in offset, ask also about larger quantities — sometimes the final difference between e.g. 500 and 1000 copies is surprisingly small (like 1500 CHF vs 1750 CHF total). This is due to the plates being the expensive constant factor.
One major question the printer will ask you is what kind of paper do you want for the cover and for the interior. What they need to know is both grammage (area density) of paper and type. The answer influences both the quality of the print and the price — do discuss different options with the printer.
The grammage influences the thickness, flexibility, durability, as well as how "see through" the paper is. In various countries it's expressed in different ways, but usually it's grams per meter squares (g/m² or gsm).
As for type, the main question is whether you want coated paper or not. Coated paper is the paper with the slick feeling to it commonly used in magazines. Uncoated paper is what you use for home / office printing, and what you see in fiction books. Also, you want acid-free paper for longevity.
Here's a list of our early recommendations:
Important: Always discuss options with the printer — they do this stuff for a living and know the ins and outs of it.
Most likely the printer will recommend going with a perfect binding (that's the name of the binding type — "perfect binding"). That's the binding where the magazine has a spine on which you can print the magazine title and issue number.
Note: Spine size depends on the number of pages in the given issue and paper thickness. As such, you might want to ask the printer what spine panel size do they recommend in the cover PDF. If the cover PDF we made available has incorrect spine size that can't be worked with, let us know — we can generate a custom one.
In case of thinner paper and shorter issues a saddle stitch binding might be another option. In that case, the magazine is just stappled in the middle and there's no spine to print text on. We don't recommend going this way, but it is still an option.