Publishing Bloom Books in Print, Print Shops, Economic Model

Bloom
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Hi Bloom Community. This isn’t a software-related question, but I thought the Bloom community might have some suggestions for us.

We are looking for a print shop, with an eventual target of large volume printing of our collection of books in the Bloom library … as a rough guess, maybe we would get to, say, half-a-million books, some 20 million pages, give or take.

We have tried but cannot find any funding source. There were funders who would have supported this kind of thing in the past, but our country is going through a rough patch and there just isn’t much development support right now. So our idea is to basically bootstrap a publishing operation, selling the books for enough to cover costs but at a price that parents in our low-income country can afford. We think that is about $1 per book, a little more or less depending on the number of pages.

There is no commercial printer in our country that can produce books for that price point. We searched for a printer abroad and happened on one Chinese printer that could produce our books for about 1 cent per page, which would work economically for us.

We plan to print using A5 size paper (148x210mm), 4 color, woodfree paper, with the cover 200g Matt Art Paper with Matte Lamination. For the binding we will use saddle stitch for small books and thread sewing with glue for books with larger numbers of pages. Our readers are children, so we need a robust binding.

We are doing an initial run with the Chinese printer of 3 collections of books (multiple titles bound together) of 1500 books … to see how it goes. Ideally, our books would be printed as individual books, but the minimum run was 500 and we wanted to test as many titles as we could. As I said, we are seeing if this will work and, if it does, we will bootstrap … so we won’t be printing half-a-million books at one go, but printing and selling and repeating the cycle for as long as we can replenish funds.

We’d be interested to know if anyone has experience attempting this sort of model, and also resources such as very cheap printing outfits that are easy to work with and reliable … and anything else we should know about but don’t as newbies stumbling into the unknown.

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Hi Michael,

Our team produced the Piksa Bible in Bloom. Similar story, as yours. We’re also printing in China, and when the books arrive in Papua New Guinea, we’ll try to sell them at cost or with a little bit of profit.

Piksa + Phone
Piksa + Phone600×451 80.1 KB

Because we laid out the books in Bloom, we get 2 for the price of 1. A paper book and a App version.

You can find the link to the app on our website:

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Hi ! Thanks for sharing your experience and good luck with the continuation of the project.

Did you have any problems meeting the printer’s requirements ? We had a few, the trickiest was that Bloom’s CMYK profile is not what our printer uses and they are not willing to share their CMYK profile (or don’t use a standard color profile). How did you find your printer ? What is the pricing like ? How are shipping the books from China to PNG and how much is that adding to your costs ?

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I’ve taken a look at your App. Very nice work and great books ! I think the book reader is the standard Bloom reader … yes ? It is definitely an advantage that all the books in your collection are downloaded at once, rather than requiring the reader to find and download the books one by one based on the language. Could you say something about your process about making your own app, based, as I guess it is, based on the Bloom reader ?

Of course, you’ve also added the games. We are also working on an App, the main motivation was to include an AI voice model for giving feedback on reading, but we are also including games. We started with Alpha Tiles but we’ve evolved towards something a bit different. Your games are very good, I’m impressed ! It would be interesting to know something about your design process for developing the games.

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Hello Michael, for such volumes, setting up your own local production facility could also be an option … with a spin-off of starting a local income generating service.

In terms of cheap printing outfits (to buy and run), I have seen a setup for West Africa where the developer researched a special glue for the back of books that will not crack in dry climates. The printers (were) are inkjet-based, fed via large IV-bags filled with ink, thus cartridge reducing cost … I think the total package was around 10-15k.

A new printer on the market, that also does thin-paper is pretore.com, based in the Netherlands. Depending on where you are, that could be an advantage in terms of shipping, customs (tariffs) etc. They are Bible printers as well and my experience with customer service in terms of sharing colour profiles was excellent. From runs of about 400 or plus, the price becomes attractive.

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Hi Michael,

We’re printing at bookprintingchina.com

They never had any issue with the Bloom PDF’s. We requested a few quotes from a few printers and this printer gave the best one. A colleague of ours had already printed 2000 Children’s Bibles with them. Those books were also made in Bloom.
Shipping from China to PNG is also reasonable. We pay less than $3000 shipping for 4000 books. Total landed cost for a hard cover, 225 page, full colour book will be $3.20

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Yes, all the books are made in Bloom. The activities are made in Active Presenter and exported as interactive websites (HTML, CSS and Javascript)
These activities can be plugged-in to Bloom very easily.
When your whole collection of books is done you can distribute them via the BloomReader app or use ReadingAppBuilder to turn all your books into an app.

Contact me at educationforlife@sil.org if you want more info.

1 Like
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@Koen72 Thank you very much … we are in our second year of working with Bloom but I did not know that the ReadingAppBuilder existed !!! We have been telling people to use the Bloom Reader … which requires that they download the books one by one, without any organization of the material. Your casual comment has revolutionized our project.

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We may check out your printer. Shipping seems a significant part of the cost for your project … you are paying $0.75 per book. It looks to be significantly higher for us in Mali, almost 50% of the cost. Still much less than using printers locally. Thanks for sharing your experience.

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@bart_eenkhoorn1 It is lovely suggestion that we might entertain in the future. The challenge is bandwidth … we are actually a technology lab, our primary work is AI and learning the print business would be … well, another skill set. However, in Africa you often end up going outside your comfort zone.