Greetings.

I just started running an Alternity: Dark Matter campaign, and I've found that several Alternity books are available from RPGnow for around $5 each. Thinking that it was a fantastic deal, I began formulating a plan to acquire them.

However, I dislike only having a PDF of a book. Knowing that several DSers bought the SR4 PDF and had it printed, I thought I'd ask you guys:

Where did you have the work done?

How much did it cost you to have the book printed? Bound?

What kind of quality did you end up with? Is the paper going to hold up to use at all, or is it no better than what I'd run through my home printer?

What did it cost for the printing? Binding? What options did you have?

Thanks in advance.

It's been a while, so I can't give any recent figures, but in my past searches I've found that printing and binding a single book can frequently cost more than purchasing the book already printed, especially when you can find it at a hefty discount (30% is usually pretty easy to scrounge up).

i do that with books. the best way to do it is with large quantities of printing. 1 book just isn't enough. 5 or more usually makes it worth it. the quality usually isn't the best. a bit better than what you'd run through your home printer unless you have a good printer. and printing it in color just isn't worth it.

Posted this on another thread recently, but seems appropriate here also...

Shadowrun 4 PDF with free errata updates ... $25
Kinko's front/back black/white printout with color cover, hole punched ... $26
Cool synthleather three-ring binder ... $10

Ability to replace errata'd content at will ... Priceless

(with apologies to MasterCard)

For $60 you could buy a copy now, wait for a few erratta iterations to pass, and buy another copy.

For $61 I have a searchable PDF document, a synthleather-bound copy of the book with folders, pen holders, a biz card slot, and a magnetic latch. When errata becomes available it's a simple matter to print the updated pages and replace them in the binder.

There's also room in the folder portion of the binder for a GM screen, character sheets, or what have you.

I'm pretty happy about the whole arrangement. =)

Unless of course you're north of the border and it costs you $48 Cdn just for the current 2nd printing....

Cool. If it works, it works. Right?

Righty-o. Ebay and Amazon for used copies it is then. Thanks for the responses.

I just printed them off at work after hours. That way it was free.

Ditto.

I work for a "document" company. We have a "lab" full of super cool printers. I work the "late" shift.

Perks baby. Perks.

Check with your local printer shop. Some places will allow you to bring in a disc of things you want printed (be sure you use a virus free disc or CD-Rom), and give you a good selection & price on what you can do. Others might not do PDF printing & binding at all.

A friend of mine printed out the SR4 book and just stuck all the pages in plastic sleeves in a thick-ass 3-ring binder. It cost him about the same as buying the book, so there really wasn't much benefit in the sense of cost.

However, where this technique really shines is in the case of bad bindings, a la most of the 4th edition GURPS books that fall to pieces within two weeks of normal use. I haven't seen the SR4 books do that yet, but that doesn't mean it hasn't happened.

This service looks interesting:

http://www.lulu.com

If you are just doing internal stuff, like making books only you will see, you don't need to register an ISBN - perfect for getting a PDF of yours printed in a bound state for personal use. They also do hardcovers.

According to the calculator on their FAQ page a 200-page B/W book perfect bound is about $8.54 US.

I haven't tried them myself. But it's a possiblity.


-karma

There's also these guys:

http://printfu.org/

Prices seem reasonable, but they're B&W only. Somtimes Kinko's balks at printing copyrighted material.

LuLu isn't really designed for printing material that you own a copy of but do not own the copyright to.

You'll be happy to hear that nothing shows up when I search for Shadowrun on lulu.com. =) The same can't be said for BitTorrent, but that's another topic. =(