TLDR: print on demand hardcovers of old books as a stretch goal?
So I was at a local game yesterday, and one of the other players had a print on demand players handbook that was hardcover
I have mostly hard covers of Ars Magica books I own
But have been unable to find hardcover versions of a few of them.
Will upgrading the print on demand options to include hardcovers from drive-thru RPG or wherever be one of the stretch goals?
And if it's not, may I humbly suggest that it be one?
I at least would absolutely pay extra for a print-on-demand hardcover that matches the rest of the books I have.
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I won't rule it out for all time, but we don't have any near-term plans to set up hardcover print-on-demand.
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Alas, I had hoped since it seems to be available as an option for other products through drive-through RPG.
Nonetheless, thank you so much for your personal reply!
We don't have any of the titles set up for POD on DriveThru. We went through the whole process of getting the files set up for Amazon's KDP print-on-demand program. Even with the files formatted as softcovers to meet Amazon's specs, we were told it's not possible to use the same files and set them up in bulk for DriveThru POD -- we have to upload each file individually, buy and review/approve a proof copy, etc. And hardcovers would mean having to do that again, and also design cover files that meet whatever their exact specs are. Multiply this by 40 titles, and consider that the person who would be doing all the file tweaking/conversion/uploading/correcting/re-uploading/reviewing/etc. is the same person who is currently working hard to lay out the entire Definitive Edition book and... well, like I said, no near-term plans to do it.
(It was actually a pretty major job over the past couple of years to get all the files created, uploaded and approved in the Amazon program, which for the early books involved going back and running Quark 3.32 in Mac OS9 to generate a postscript dump that could be distilled into a PDF matching their specs. We are happy to have achieved our goal of doing that for the entire line before the Definitive Edition campaign -- even books that are still available in their original hardcover print runs.)
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