Sub Ubi

A question came in today from Matthew:

Thanks for the information on lulu.com and your  experiences creating
picture books.
I’m curious if you could compare the photo quality to other sources?
Is it better than glossy magazine?

As for the layout tools, it sounds like what you want is Pages, which
is part of the iWork bundle.
It lets you create custom layouts, select layouts on a per page
basis, drag and drop from iPhoto (or, even better, from the built in
“media browser” which is integrated with iPhoto) onto placeholder
images, and print to PDF (just like any good mac app).

I’m probably going to order an experimental lulu book soon.  Thanks
for the review/comments.

(I’ve written about creating photobooks under Mac OS X and sending them to Lulu.com in a few previous posts; oldest to newest these are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.)

I talked a little bit about quality here, but realize that I’m rather vague about the print quality in some respects. Is it equivalent to or better than a glossy magazine? No. Glossies are printed on heavier paper, with higher-resolution processes than available to us as purchasers of low-cost print-on-demand services. However, what exactly is going on with the printing made available through Lulu? I’m going to try and dig that out…

So, first off, I’ve found some good details about how to prepare and upload your documents—especially if you want full-bleed inside the document. This usually won’t matter, I don’t think, but it’s good to know. Additionally, Don Campbell has a good PDF creation FAQ—but again, this isn’t getting us to print quality. (I thought it was there, somewhere!)

A-ha! Here we go—some snippets from the linked thread:

Some of you may know that Lulu uses two different printers. For Lulu orders, the printer is Colorcentric, based in Rochester NY. For retail orders, books are printed by Lightning Source. (LSI) which is owned by Ingram, Lulu’s retail distributor.

…

I’ve seen my book printed from both Colorcentric and the retail version from LSI. They are indeed bookstore quality. By no means, do they look cheap or lpoor quality. Only thing I’d like is if they started to use acid-free paper.

Now, I don’t know what “bookstore quality” means, but it probably means high-quality printing on a reasonably heavy-gloss acid-free paper. Consider that my last photobook was made in January 2004, which would predate the Lulu partnership with Colorcentric by a number of months. So, I’ve never seen the new photobooks Lulu produces; I will soon (I have one or two to order for friends departing Canterbury), and I suspect I’ll be even more surprised by the quality than I was with the first book I ordered.

That may not be a perfect answer, but it does put you in a position to dig further and perhaps discover exactly what printers Colorcentric uses for Lulu orders. I’d certainly like to know, and will update this post if I dig it up later today.