Electronic Files to Printing House

When you send your book to the printing house in an electronic format, you are taking advantage of the latest technology to produce a high-resolution book. The resulting book depends on the method used by the printing house. They may laser print your book at 600 dpi, or they may create films directly at 1200 or 2400 dpi.

Don’t confuse the act of sending electronic files to the printer with sending electronic files by modem. Using the modem is just a shipping method. Although electronic submission can be a great time saver, there is no need to get into electronic data communications in this discussion. You can always send your electronic files by mail, UPS, or FedEx. All printers will accept files on disk, though some accept only Mac or only IBM disks.

PostScript Files

When you send your electronic files to the printing house, you will be sending PostScript files. This is a key requirement. Whether or not you are planning to send your first book electronically, you should keep this requirement in mind while making your hardware and software decisions.Even if you are not sending electronic files for your first book, you should be planning ahead to the time when you will use electronic submission. That is, you should be formatting your book for PostScript and proofing it on a PostScript laser printer. If you start working with PostScript now, you won’t find it necessary to change your entire desktop-publishing setup later.

PostScript Files and Your Printer

Since you are either using electronic files now, or you are planning ahead to the time when you will use electronic files, you need a PostScript laser printer. A PostScript laser printer will show you, at a lower resolution, how your pages will print out at the printing house.

Your laser printer can probably be a low-resolution 300 dpi PostScript laser printer, because you are using it only for proofing the manuscript. If you must send laser printout to the printing house, use a 600 dpi laser printer. In either case, the printer must be PostScript.

When you are ready to prepare your PostScript files for the printing house, read the instructions from your printing house. The Customer Support team at your printing house will be happy to provide exact instructions for creating the files they need.

Price Differences in Electronic Submission

Here is a quick overview of laser and electronic formats, starting with the lowest resulting quality.

Pre-press Formats in Ascending Order of Quality

Table 1

Table 1 gives you a format comparison, starting with a 300 dots per inch laser printout to an electronic PostScript file converted by the printing house to 2400 dots per inch film. Note that the printing house cannot improve the quality of a laser printout, whether 300 or 600 dpi. The printer can, however, print your electronic PostScript files at a high resolution, sometimes at a higher cost to you.

These are estimates of the charges levied by printing houses for electronic book submission. Many printing houses will not charge you extra for sending PostScript files, but the charges will vary by the printing house. If you are dealing with a printing house that charges, you may be able to get the electronic charges reduced or removed.

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