Printing services in the UK for airport charts?
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There is no ambiguity in what i said before:
One thing must be clear though.
You’re all free to do whatever you want with your own manualsBut you do not offer your solution to other ppl in this forum. The reason we decided to do ourselves was to control it on our own.
I understand you guys may want other solution, and that’s quite all right.
But we reserve the right to publish the manuals in our own way through a unique system which is readily available here already.You are free to print your own manuals in any way you like.
you do not offer your printing solution to anyone else. Because doing so you control our work in our place and that is not accepted as we can’t ensure that whoever decides to do so can’t add a fee for himself his work and/or his trouble going through the initiative.Our work is free and must remain so.
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I seem to have inadvertantly opened a can of worms, which was, of course, not my intention.
This morning I received the navigation manual from dox. It’s spiral bound, with a clear acetate cover and plain white card back cover, in black and white and on 90gsm A5 paper. The cost was £9.35. The quality is good, though some of the smaller writing on the charts can be a little hard to read. But overall it’s perfectly legible.
If I had ordered the same thing from Lulu it would have been in colour, bound as a paperback and cost £29.53.
Not only could I not have justified the cost, but the binding isn’t as practical as spiral binding.
Don’t get me wrong, the Lulu versions look fabulous. But in terms of cost and practicality going through dox for me, and I’m sure for many others, was much the better option.
As far as cost is concerned and the desire to avoid others making a profit out of the manuals is Lulu not making a profit? If we printed them out ourselves would HP not be making a profit from the ink cartridges?
I don’t mean to step on anyones toes, and I can respect the desire to have these things printed at a higher level of quality, but as someone pointed out earlier, isn’t it more important that as many people as possible get access to the printed manuals?
By the way, as a token of peace I’m quite willing to share the Haribo’s that came with the manual.
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As far as cost is concerned and the desire to avoid others making a profit out of the manuals is Lulu not making a profit? If we printed them out ourselves would HP not be making a profit from the ink cartridges?
that’s the point, the printing guy will make a profit as they are all commercial company and that is normal. Just the same as dox whom you asked printing for you also made a profit.
It’s the same thing as Lulu.
With 4.32 this community screamed for Lulu, with 4.33 we decided to go lulu from the start and you guys still complain.
I am sorry, we can’t please all poeple and we have no time to manage multiple ways to print the manuals. If you’re not happy with the way it’s done now, feel free to do it on your own way, managing the project on your own, but for your own use, not for distribution.Once again what we want to avoid is that we don’t want a member of this community who has nothing to do with writing the manuals in the first palce to also make a profit when says he uses dox (or any other printing services) but add a few euro for his own trouble and then sell to this community here.
Hence our request to respect our décisions - imho it shouldn’t be hard to understand. You guys get everything for free. you could at least respect the fact that we want to control the way it’s done, no?
I don’t mean to step on anyones toes, and I can respect the desire to have these things printed at a higher level of quality, but as someone pointed out earlier, isn’t it more important that as many people as possible get access to the printed manuals?
Everyone has access to manuals for free. so your point is pretty void as anyone is free to print them the way they want - but for their own use only.
Once again, we want to control the publication of our manuals for obvious reasons such as the manuals remaining free of charge, but also future manual update management.
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I’m not sure how £30 per manual qualifies as being “free of charge”, to be honest. A third of that price is quite a bit closer to that idea.
But, it’s your bat and ball, and as I have no desire to be banned I shall shut up forthwith.
Oh, and I’m sure I speak for all when I say I’m grateful for all the hard work that goes into putting the documentation together.
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I was confused by RD’s reply at first but here’s what I understand from his statements:
1. You are free to order the OFFICIAL manuals from Lulu at the price Lulu asks for.
2. You are free to have the manuals printed out at home or at a local printing shop for YOUR OWN use.
3. You are NOT ALLOWED to offer printing services, whether it is yourself or another company.The basic reason here is that the BMS devs provide us the PDFs for free. If you order from Lulu, Lulu makes money. If you order from Staples, Staples makes money. If you order from dox, dox makes money. If you print it out yourself on your HP printer, HP makes money. The BMS devs are okay with that. However, if -Ice comes in and says “hey guys, my local printer can print this out for us for £10,” BMS devs are NOT okay with that because then, -Ice has “taken control” of the work (not a very good way to describe it, but yeah) and at this point, BMS devs cannot really be sure if the cost is £10 or if it is just £8 and -Ice gets £2 for every manual printed out.
Although there are ways to deal with this issue, I think the BMS devs cannot devote the time and effort needed to assess and decide on each particular case so they just made a blanket statement in this regard.
I think that explains it clearly enough.
I would like to pose a few clarification questions to RD though:
a. Are we allowed to post pictures and state where we had our manuals printed? For instance, “this is my manual, I had it printed out from Staples for £XX.YY amount” or “here’s my ring-bound manual which I printed out myself. It cost me $XX.YY in ink/toner and it cost another $AA.BB to have it ring bound at my local Kinkos”
b. Are we allowed to discuss “home solutions” for binding?Do note that for points “a” and “b,” these are all for personal use and is not offering any “printing/binding services” to the community.
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I’m not sure how £30 per manual qualifies as being “free of charge”, to be honest
You are not objective. Any other printing solution as I already pointed a dozen time is not free of charge either.
Why is it so hard for you people to understand? Lulu was chosen because of this community request with 4.32.
Granted I didn’t make a market study before having the 4.33 manuals there. I went with what I thought was best.I’m sorry you don’t like it, but you are still a minority.
Let’s put it this way.
Let’s allow anyone here to take the manuals we took a year to write. Put them on any and all online printing solution available at large to the community.
Since the printing solution will be cheaper, let’s have these ppl putting our manuals online add a few euros for their own trouble managing the project.
After all we decided to offer all this to you. But these ppl may or may not have the same philosophy as us.And in 3-4 weeks when we update our own work. What are these ppl going to do? Update their own project? Will they still be around?
The community will still print outdated manuals nobody has any control on.
And the community will come here, turn to us and once again complain?Look further than your nose ppl.
Oh, and I’m sure I speak for all when I say I’m grateful for all the hard work that goes into putting the documentation together.
Thanks for the gratitude
I’m seriously thinking about stopping all this manual work to spare me the frustration you (the community at large) impose on me about this.You are never happy and after the thousands hours we spent on the manuals I know realise it was a loss of time and providing only frustrations.
Thank you people -
hi Red Dog,
I think that throughout the forum there is a lot of clear expression of appreciation for the manuals. I am sure that the vast majority of BMS users implicetely or explicetely (not sure these are English words) are more than impressed by the details, quality and overall form of the manuals and the huge amount of work you have put in them. Please do not feel/get offended or frustrated by a very small number of posters who are just trying to **** up things (and are simply trolling by keeping to push the subject). -
Red Dog, I think you are missing the point here. There is no question that the manuals are simply awesome! Nobody will debate that.
However, people will have different preferences with regards to bindings (perfect-bound vs. spiral/spring bound) and people will also have different budgets with which to print these manuals out. For some, Lulu is simply expensive. For others with money to spare, Lulu is affordable. However, none of this is a complaint against the QUALITY of the manuals, it is simply a discussion and comparison of cheaper-than-Lulu printing options.
Granted that you cannot please everybody, I feel that giving only one option was not the best way to go either.
I do understand that you feel under pressure regarding this issue –- please don’t be. We appreciate your work and again, there is no question regarding the quality of it. It is only the printing options that are being scrutinized here.
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Let’s not get frustrated - too much good work and attitude here. Need sticky in the forum that explains the clear rules Red Dog laid out, need to close these threads with “thanks for showing off your off-site print, see sticky here”, get happy faces.
This is a product, the product comes with some lulu print options, don’t derive other products (for gain or not for gain) - it’s not hard
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Surely its nice to have the cheaper options guys… If I choose to get these printed at least now I have several options to choose from, that can’t be a bad thing…