Print-on-Demand

Professional PDF Printing & Book Binding

So what exactly is professional PDF Printing and Book binding? Well, the Guild of Blades Retail Group is a professional "Print on Demand" printer of soft cover books and custom playing cards. We produce lots of RPG books and card games for smaller publishers within the hobby games industry.

Since opening our first store in Madison Heights, Michigan, GOB Retail has been printing and binding individual gaming PDFs for customers as well. We are now offering that service nation wide (and even world wide).

You own a PDF game book and want to have it printed? That's right, you no longer have to worry about taking it to your local copy shop only to have them refuse to do it out of fear of potential copyright violation. Nor do you need to get a shoddy comb or tape binding. We can professionally print your PDF game products and bind them into soft cover books. In many cases, these books look indentical or near indentical to the official soft cover books originally released by the publisher.

But what about the copyright issues?

That's fairly simple. Most game PDFs that are sold are sold with the intent that the end user be allowed to print them out for use. Now, grant, that original intent likely was assumed to be you printing them out at home with your inkjet printer. But technology continues to evolve and now a service like ours is possible. So, if you legitimately own a PDF or E-Book and your PDF or E-Book does not come bundled with a restrictive license which limits your right as a consumer to print it, then you are entitled to hire a 3rd party such as us to print it for you. We just happen to be a POD Book printer as well, so we have the capability to bind up the books we print into soft cover books, then professionally trim them.

What does it cost?

That's simple. Its $1.50 for a color cover (printed on 10 pt cover stock...same as most normal soft cover books) or $1.20 for a black and white one. If the books is 40 pages or less, it can be saddle stitched (side staple bound) for $.99 or if its more than 40 pages it will get perfect bound (soft cover book binding) for $3.50. In both cases, the binding fee includes a professional post binding trimming.

Interior page cost $.06 per page for B&W or $.15 for color. However, for B&W interiors, we let you print multiple (different) PDFs to achieve volume discounts. So per page it drops to $.05 if you have 500-999 pages or $.045 for 1000+ pages. B&W interior pages are printed on a nice 60lb offset white paper (much better paper than cheap 20lb bond copy paper).

Excited yet? Those long out of print and hard to find books need not remain confined to pixels on your laptop. You can now have them made into traditional soft cover books.

How to Order:

Well, in our effort to respect publisher copyrights, we must insist that our customers be able to show proper ownership of their PDFs. This will mean you will need to have obtained them from a site that sells the PDFs or a site distributing the PDFs for free and you will need to be able to show us a record of that purchase. As such, ordering a PDF to be printed and bound is a several step process.

1) We are not licensed to /sell/ you any PDFs at this time. So you will need to obtain your PDFs from an autorized seller, a partial list that is far from complete can be seen below. You will need to send us all files that are needed for print. As we are not the owners of said PDFs we do not have them, do not archive them and only hold the copy you send us long enough to print it, then delete it. If you have web space you can put the files on your own web space and then e-mail us with direct download links. If you lack your own web space, you may use a file transfer service such as www.YouSendIt.com. You will need to send files to ajohnson@guildofblades.com.

2) You will need to show proof of ownership of the document that we will be printing. Perhaps the easiest method will be to open up your account page from whichever E-Product retail site you acquired the document from, then take a screen shot of the appropriate listing of the document. E-mail that screen to ajohnson@guildofblades.com. We reserve the right to refuse any order where there is not a clear evidence of rightful acquisition of the PDF.

3) Phone it in to 248-430-4980 (M-TH 11:30am to 7:30pm, F-Sat 11:30am to 10pm or Sun 12-5, all eastern standard time). Wait a few hours or until the next day for us to recieve both the documents for print and the screen shot or other appropriate evidence of ownership, then call us to place the order. We will review the condition of the document and its readiness for print and provide you with a quote for the cost to print it and have it shipped to you.

4) Payment. We can accept most major credit cards by phone at the time you call in the order or we can send you an invoice via Paypal if you would like to pay using Paypal. Your order will be scheduled for print once full payment has been rendered.

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GOB's RPGNow affiliate store
E23 from Steve Jackson Games
www.wargamedownloads.com

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Notes:

The quality of print that can be achieved with a PDF is somewhat dependent on the quality of the PDF itself. For instance, a PDF that was created at 72DPI will be of slightly lower print quality than one that was made at 300 DPI.

Not all PDF books were made to include a back cover page. If we are printing such a PDF, you have a few options. We can flood the back cover with a single color. We can duplicate the front cover on the back cover. We can leave the back cover white. Or for just $1 more, you can send us any picture you own and have the right to use (perhaps a picture of yourself, your family, your dog, etc) and we can put that picture on the back cover.

Some PDF books have been "locked" to prevent loading the PDF into any other programs and sometimes to prevent printing. This in itself does not prohibit your right to print it or have it printed. Only a restrictive license from the publisher can do that. But it does make it a bit harder to print on our end. There will be a $5 surcharge to print and bind books from a locked PDF. Assuming we are able to print it at all. Occasionally we simply can't.

We ship ONLY via the United States Post Office and we will always ship using some form of delivery confirmation. By default we will quote you the price to ship it by priority mail unless you specifically request media mail service (less expensive) or expedited services like overnight shipping.