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Tuesday, January 19, 2021

News - Saddle-stitch to be Discontinued at OneBookShelf / DriveThruRPG


I got this email yesterday and talked about it on last night's podcast, but it's important enough to both publishers and their customers that I felt I needed to share it here too.

From DriveThruRPG:

Dear publishers, 

Our printer, Lightning Source, has informed us that they will be discontinuing saddle-stitch printing very soon. The format will no longer be available as of March 1, 2021. We apologize for this change; we realize it is happening without much notice and have voiced our concern with Lightning Source. They have determined the format is not profitable, however, and they cannot continue to support it.

For those publishers who currently have saddle-stitch titles, you will need to convert your title to perfect-bound and, where necessary, add blank pages to reach the minimum allowable size of 18 pages. 

However, currently our site automatically treats premium color books under 49 pages in length as saddle-stitch. We are in the process of updating to handle any premium color book of 18 pages or more as perfect bound. Once we have made that change in our site code, we will let you know so that you can begin uploading your conversions of previously saddle-stitch titles to perfect-bound.

In the meantime, you might also decide to update your premium color saddle-stitch titles to perfect-bound standard color, which can be uploaded now to our site.

If your saddle-stitch title has pages the customer would remove from the book, or has so few pages that adding blank pages to get to the 18-page minimum size for perfect-bound does not seem an ideal option, you might also consider converting your title to use card tiles, card sheets, or even a mini-poster instead of a book. See our Publisher Knowledgebase (https://onebookshelfpublisherservice.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/227867627-Printed-Card-Formats-Costs) for more information on those formats.

Yours, 

OneBookShelf Publisher Relations

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3 comments:

  1. Paper with stapes is a problem.. what a load of shit.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Then it must be available elsewhere at a competitive price otherwise lightningsource would have simply increased their price.
    They probably have machines that need replacing.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I worked in a print shop for 8 years, and where I worked saddle-stitching books was a lot easier and cheaper than glue binding the perfect bound books.

    ReplyDelete

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