Calendars on Lulu

[jeff_duntemann]

I'm heading off to Chicago later today to witness our new niece's baptism, but before I shut down I wanted to report on another Lulu publishing feature that I tested: Calendars. In addition to books, music, and other digital downloads, Lulu allows you to publish photo calendars as well. So to

Comments

color printing

[happy_hacker]

I always assumed color was more expensive because a given thing has to be printed three times, once for each ink color *and* registration has to be pretty tight, which suggests you get a lot of wasted runs, and a lot of labor.

It could just be them charging what the market will bear, though. It will be interesting to see if that changes as color laser printing penetrates into the high speed, print on demand world and/or as some bright spark comes up with a way to print multiple colors on one roller. A job for nanomachines, one imagines. I have to wonder if e-ink technology won't revolutionize paper printing sometime in the very near future, by virtue of being able to control the movement of microscopic amounts of ink. Something like silk screen meets core memory as a mask, and then you spray the ink on the paper as an aerosol, flip up the color you want in each ink molecule, and move the mask on to the next page.

-Jim

Re: color printing

[happy_hacker]

One would expect color xeroprinting to be somewhat more expensive than b/w xeroprinting, but not 10X-15X more expensive, which is what we're seeing these days. The cost of color inkjet cartridges is a scandal.

That's an interesting concept for color printing, and I have high hopes that something along those lines turns up in the next 10-12 years. When I first read about Wil McCarthy's "wellstone" concept, the first thing that came to mind was a near-infinite resolution programmable printing plate, in which quantum dots create colored ink on demand and lay them down on paper at any arbitrary resolution down to the size of the dye molecules themselves. (Most other applications of wellstone sound like BS to me, unless I completely misunderstand the concept. I'll have more to say on this eventually, once I get some advice from a couple of real physicists.)

Re: color printing

[jeff_duntemann]

The above message posted as "anonymous" rather than asking me to log in. But it was me, really.

Calendars

[anonymous]

They are brilliant for family history calendars; trust me I've done it. I made three different ones for Xmas as I normally send calendars to my family. Only small problem was the date insertion so I dropped the dates (who neeeded them). The way to make the 12 photos on one slide preview; copy the images from your calendar when it's on preview on lulu so they are all the same size- paste them onto a word document. Save the word doc as a JPEG and uplift.)