Print on Demand services

[William Gaffga]

Greetings. This year we have removed printing manuals from our budget. 
Whether you agree with this move or not ... well, we can start another 
discussion on this beastie. Either way, we decided that a certain 
percentage of our clients would still like to have the books, not just 
help and PDFs.

So, Print-on-demand is a good solution. I started with eight services 
and have narrowed the search to four: PrintOnDemand.com, BookStand 
Publishing, BookSurge and OfficeMax is expanding their ImPress service 
into this space.

We started a test with PrintOnDemand.com (aka lulu.com) as it looked 
like the best choice but their service starts to break down when you 
have 9 languages and ~25 books per language. There is no way to really 
chunk this ... their structure is flat so I can't do separate sections 
per language. I tried to get around this by adding some HTML and 
breaking the content up on a page but their PHP won't (for whatever 
reason) let anchor links work.

So ... does anybody use any of these services? Do you recommend a 
different service? Oh, also, some services cannot cope with the 
international nature of this, like sending books to somewhere "exotic" 
like the Czech Republic (yes, that term was used). This last bit would 
imply that it'd be nice if there was some possiblity of localization on 
the site, or at least that we could hack in.

Thanks!

Will.
-- 
Will. Gaffga
Documentation Manager
Gibbs and Associates
Moorpark, CA USA
805-523-0004
AIM:gaffga1