Image Quality and Cost Assessment of Print-On-Demand Books from Web-Based Vendors Offering One-Off Printing

Due to the emergence of e-commerce and developments in print engines designed for economical output of very short runs, there are increased business opportunities and consumer options for print-on-demand books. The current state of this printing mode allows for direct uploading of book files via the web, printing on non-offset printers, and distributing by standard parcel or mail delivery services. The goal of this research is to assess the image quality and relative cost of a soft cover book printed by various web-based vendors offering one-off printing. Six vendors were identified. Sixteen observers rank ordered overall quality of a subset of individual pages from each book. Observers also applied overall quality ratings to the perfect bound books. Objective metrics of color gamut, color accuracy, overall contrast, ICC profiling accuracy, sharpness, noise, and actual cost were obtained. None of the objective metrics was an indication alone of overall quality. For example, printers with smaller color gamut, lower color accuracy or lower contrast were still able to achieve high overall image quality. Photographic quality was highly correlated with overall quality assessments, more so than text quality. Overall image quality had positive correlation to actual cost. One publisher had a cost model that was significantly lower than the other one-off vendors. Introduction Digital color imaging is seeing the fastest growth rate in the non-offset digital printing category [1]. The print engines have begun to enable inexpensive output of very short run documents right down to one-off books that can sell for as little as $10 a unit. The Internet has spawned new business models such as print-ondemand art books or books where individuals can self-publish for small or no fee by uploading their content online [2,3,4]. Webbased publishers have begun to capitalize on this new approach, creating menus and information guides for individuals wishing to print and publish books [5,6,7,8,9,10]. Some websites even offer assistance in obtaining ISBN numbers [e.g., 5,11]. In addition, websites are creating new international social networking environments for book publishers [5]. The goal of the study described here was to baseline the current state of one-off standard books in terms of delivered image quality and price expectations. An approximately 90-page book with most pages one-sided was designed for the purposes of the study and through web interfaces was uploaded to each of six online vendors for soft-cover publication. The one-off printed and bound books were delivered through typical services such as UPS, Federal Express and US Mail. Psychophysical experiments were run to gain understanding of how perceived image quality responses corresponded to physical measurements and cost. Observers evaluated individual pages that had been removed from the books and also evaluated books in their intended format as perfect bound books.