Scribus Friendly Print Shops

Here you can recommend and shortly describe a print shop that has proved to be reliable and Scribus/PDF Friendly.

Please provide a short description of the printer and what they do (sheetfed, litho offset, etc). In particular, if you can find a link to their specifications, please provide it here. It would also be extremely useful to know if they accept PDF/X-3 jobs, CMYK jobs, or both.

The official Scribus documentation, maintained on docs.scribus.net, already includes some Scribus friendly printers.

Important note to future editors:

This list is limited to print shops reported by Scribus users as Scribus/PDF friendly and shouldn't be treated as a cheap place for your ads — they will be removed anyway.

Lulu

Read what Scribus users reported on the mailing list:

• http://nashi.altmuehlnet.de/pipermail/scribus/2005-November/013916.html
• http://nashi.altmuehlnet.de/pipermail/scribus/2005-November/013917.html
• http://nashi.altmuehlnet.de/pipermail/scribus/2005-November/013944.html

Short description:
Lulu is an internet based POD (Print On Demand) service, owned by Bob Young (Red Hat) and located in Morrisville, NC, USA.

Pros:

• No setup costs
• Can handle PDF produced with Scribus very well
• Excellent color print quality
• They will also market your publications for you

Cons:

• Hard cover is currently limited to 6"x9"
• Soft cover" isn't like the softcover you'd get at a supermarket — it's thicker than magazine covers, but less than a penguin cover and, reportedly, there are some book oriented organizations which simply will not stock or shelve or whatever, such prints (apparently for this reason).

• It's worth adding; while LuLu does provide an on-site calculator, pricing on their booklet printing tends to be a little confusing. One factor is the [base price], different for any selected format of book_ add to this a price-per-page cost (considerably different for color or black and white), and these together determine the basic cost for -EACH COPY- of the booklet printed... current example: 50 page, 8.5x11 cost is $5.53 B&W /or/ $12.03 Color.
• Further possible confusion may arise over what qualifies as a color or black and white book - for instance, an all text booklet would print nicely in black/and/white... but, adding one page with a color photo, this same will be charged as full color printing. By excluding any interior color photo, and adding a color cover, the booklet cost DOES NOT increase over basic black and white price. All this, to me, was a little confusing; and, this review may otherwise seem a little critical... still, LuLu is one of the fastest, friendliest, in fact, the -only- service I could find in U.S. which gives you options of stapled /or/ coil /or/ perfect binding for your booklet from Scribus PDF... very nice... couldn't touch this, cost or quality wise at the local copy shop, so I recommend it :)