quote:
Originally posted by rwmastel
Pardon my ignorance, but how does a printing method limit the number of pages? Do you mean there is a physical or systematic limit, or is it simply cost prohibitive?
This was answered in the original note, at least in terms of vendor restrictions and requirements.
It has to do with what the vendor offers. I don't know if the limit is systemic or what--from my experience in the printing industry I'll hazard a guess: it's simply what the vendor chooses to offer. The other potential issue is that photobooks generally are not
true hard covers (stitched)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookbinding but rather perfect bound (The Star is perfect bound) books, glued at the spine with hard covers. There's a difference. Going beyond the 100 pages they offer may create some kind of binding issue. Who knows--it doesn't matter. They stick to their limits and their offerings.
In the "photobook" method, there are generally set templates to work with from a design standpoint; a constrained set of page sizes; of binding styles; and pages from 20-100. You cannot vary from these formats, sizes or pages.
...which is one reason I am exploring other methods.
If you want to see the constraints in terms of photobooks, take a cruise around a few major photobook sites:
http://mpix.com/productsinfo.aspx?prod=21http://mypublisher.com/products.phphttp://www.kodakgallery.com/PhotoBookOverview.jsphttp://www.picaboo.com/photobooks/index.html...there are a lot more out there but they all have many constraints in terms of size, number of pages, etc. They also nearly all get more expensive as the page count goes up (priced per page) and the cost per book is fixed based on size and page count; not the number of books ordered. That last item is counter-intuitive to most of out thinking. Constraints, constraints, constraints.
Hope that helps.