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Permission to send a PDF to a POD service like Lulu


scoolio

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  • 2 months later...

The publisher does not appear to frown on printing services as long as they are only being used to generate hardcopies for personal use by legal purchasers of the (PDF) material.

 

As to why some books are shipped as password protected PDFs while others are not, I have no idea. To the extent to which such passwords prevent widespread digital copying and distributing they make sense, though I don't believe they prevent anything of the sort. To the extent to which they prevent printings strictly for personal use, there is no legal ground for them to stand upon. Which makes those passwords pointless and annoying, to be frank.

 

If you find a way to remove the password and only use the resulting PDF to make a personal hardcopy, be assured that (1) copyright law in on your side and, (2) HERO Games is not going to be upset with you.

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  • 5 months later...

How many copies (of each volume) are you trying to have printed? Did you legally purchase the PDFs?

 

Assuming the answers to those questions are "one" and "yes" respectively, you could try explaining to them that the Fair Use provisions of U.S. Copyright Law allow you to make a hard copy for yourself. But if they don't know that already you may have difficulty convincing them of it. After all, they already think you're trying to get away with something.

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ChaosDrgn,

Perhaps you should show them the receipts for your purchase(s) as proof that you have the legal right (under fair use provisions of Copyright Law)...

 

As for secured PDF's -- it really ticks me off when I'm trying to cut/paste some text (for my own annotation use) from a secured PDF that I purchased ... and can't.

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Legally purchased PDFs should not be secured with a password you don't know. If they are, ask the vendor for the password that you are entitled to. If they refuse, or can't be reached, there are plenty of easy remedies (i.e., mechanisms for unlocking the PDFs).

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  • 1 month later...

...How exactly does one POD a .pdf through Lulu for personal use?

 

I tried that a few days ago, and while there's plenty of advice for exporting from various word processors, it's not applicable if you just have a .pdf.

I may be misunderstanding the question, but PDF is one of the formats you can upload for printing. (http://connect.lulu.com/t5/Publishing-Process/What-types-of-files-can-I-upload/ta-p/33469)

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Once you begin a book project, there will be two points along the way where you will have the opportunity to upload files. The first is for the main content of the book, and you can upload as many PDF files as you like, within the page count limit of the type of book you are making. I recommend organizing the content yourself into a single PDF, rather than relying on Lulu's collating process to do that for you.

 

The second opportunity will be for the wraparound cover, if you elect to provide your own custom cover art. Again, a single PDF file is best. Any embedded raster images should be 200dpi or 300dpi for best results.

 

There is a jobcontrol script that you can get from Lulu that can be used by Adobe applications to prepare your PDFs with all the settings that will make them "Lulu friendly". Running your PDFs through it isn't strictly necessary, but it does help smooth out any gotchas that might be lurking in your PDFs. The most common problems revolve around embedded fonts, transparency effects, and advanced features in the more recent versions of the PDF format specification (I believe Lulu only supports up to version 1.4 of the PDF format, but my information is a couple of years old at this point).

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Oh, and one last thing to watch out for: if you have a PDF that was created on a Macintosh and saved by the MacOS "Quartz" subsystem, it will not come out properly when printed by Lulu. All you will get are blank pages with a handful of black dots scattered about. You will have to re-distill such PDFs into "clean" PDFs using software like Adobe Distiller or Acrobat Pro. You can tell if a PDF was made by Quartz by opening it in any reader that will let you view the file's metadata, which contains creation information.

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I've printed around two dozen books through Lulu and never had an ISBN image put onto the cover by Lulu. Then again, I don't ever use their cover "wizard". I always upload my own wraparound cover art. Coming up with the cover art is half the fun!

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