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1] POD station: Mute have some smaller printers who act more informally around London and have good relations with them, Simon from Mute has also been working with RIT Rochester Institute of Technology, who have made a system or are developing it, that can go straight from the web into a book form or newspaper and is for making instant newspapers and books.
http://drupal.org/project/innovationnewsprofile
He's actively working with the system and looking how you can do booksprints or fast productions. and say this would be a really good system to use for a collaborative writing and instant POD production.
POD with Mute as designed/proofed fro print process = 3 weeks
Set up costs £165-200
Book costs approx £1.80 ea.
update
after meeting w. Simon 17.12.09 simon@metamute.org
General limitations:
i] portrait [landscape many more problems]
ii] size smaller better. eg. 152 x229 [called Royal or Octava]
iii] paper type - standard bookwove 80gms
simpler if no images
cover [+ image if req.], contents/preface end papers all best predesigned if 24hr turnaround required.
options:
a] simplest - prestyled [eg. code/text/prompt] to dump to standard dtp
b] 'single source production' - 1 set of data not tied to any particular output platform - XSLT = xml transform, which is a pretty wel mapped route but can be time consuming
Also possibility to do multiple revisions of book over the week [ie. multiple versions outputted]
2] Line printer [jk can get Manesmann-Tally MT81 dot-matrix printer with serial and parallel interfaces, new ribbon and box of fanfold printer] DONE
3] Laser printer w. collator/binder
4] see http://en.flossmanuals.net/booksprints
5] Proboscis' .pdf-based bookleteer publish-on-demand web-app service http://bookleteer.com/ for e-book-to-print using their Diffusion service http://diffusion.org.uk/?page_id=147
Cover
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3. diagram
